PREFACE
America is a country so rich in human and material resources, so bountifully supplied with reserves of raw materials and surpluses of goods, that we have been inclined to be wasteful and extravagant. Except in a few fields, we have not been accustomed to practice thrift and conservation on a national scale. An outstanding example of this characteristic is our indifference toward the waste of life and property from automobile accidents.

Considering the ever increasing magnitude of these losses and their enhanced importance now in terms of loss of man-hours in production and of manpower in our fighting services, we might expect to find a growing appreciation of the need for solving the accident problem. But on the contrary there is a tendency today to relegate highway safety to the limbo of non-essential activities. The reason, seldom openly expressed, which underlies this attitude is: "Transportation of men and materials by motor vehicles has always involved dangers and losses. In war time we must be prepared to pay the price, however high it may be." Those who have taken this attitude apparently have failed to realize that automobile accidents result primarily from human inefficiencies which, when they are removed, tend to speed up transportation, and that safer transportation would inevitably result in the more efficient functioning of our military machine as well as of our industrial organization. Another indication of our indifference toward the automobile casualty problem is the scarcity of organized information on the subject. Outside of a few specialized technical books, mostly on the engineering and enforcement phases of safety, some elementary instruction manuals, an assortment of undigested statistics, and a considerable amount of twaddle, there is a glaring deficiency of literature on either the theory or the practice of accident control. We have hardly begun the task of building up a science of automobile accident prevention.

Although the amount of available accredited knowledge about highway accidents is paltry, it should nevertheless be pointed out that certain phases of the problem at least have been of concern to a variety of different groups. Thus army officers are vitally interested in having military vehicles reach their objectives; automobile insurance officials, in reducing the number and cost of claims; vehicle fleet supervisors, in cheaper and faster transportation; psychologists, in tests of driving skill; highway and traffic engineers, in the influence of signs, signals, volume of traffic, and road design on accidents; automotive engineers, in the design of the vehicle; safety council leaders, in newspaper and radio safety propaganda; legislators, in passing restrictive laws; educators, in driver instruction and training; police officials, in enforcing the laws on the highways; and motor vehicle administrators, in regulating drivers through the authority to issue and suspend licenses. But most of these specialists devote little of their time to accident prevention. With them it is nearly always a side line of some bread-and-butter activity often only remotely associated with safety. Further, many of these specialists can appreciate only one solution to accidents -- their own -- and consequently seldom collaborate with others interested in the problem.

Our state motor vehicle, police, and highway departments have assumed part-time responsibilities for dealing with limited aspects of the automobile accident problem. These departments have insufficient funds for preventive safety activities, and, devoting themselves unreservedly to their specialties, they sometimes fail to understand the value of each other's efforts and of the need for a united front. As for our communities and our country as a whole, we have been disposed to leave highway accident prevention to private enterprise or to charity. Great credit is due those private and volunteer organizations which have labored unselfishly for highway safety. But it is time that we as a nation grew out of the idea that automobile accident prevention should, like industrial safety, be left to private enterprise, or, like disasters resulting from acts of God, be left to private charity supported by drives. Rather we should consider highway safety as much a public responsibility as wild life and forest conservation, pest control, and the eradication of communicable diseases. And just as we publicly sustain these latter activities, so we should assign to highway accident prevention the services of full-time, properly trained public servants, with adequate funds and facilities at their disposal to study the perplexing problems involved.

We must admit that by and large we have been muddling along in our efforts at curbing highway accidents, floundering in search of little remedies for large troubles, instead of giving the problem the serious attention it deserves. In place of emotional appeals and scattered efforts through what we have been labeling the three E's (Engineering, Enforcement, and Education), we need to incorporate accident prevention as a unified activity in the framework of our national, state, and local governments, for highway accident prevention, although it has many phases, is essentially a single problem -- deserving of full-time attention -- which can be solved most economically and effectively by an intelligently planned unitary attack. I have attempted in this book to outline the various phases of the highway safety problem, to assess their relative significance, and to offer the reader a bird's-eye view of the field. It is to be hoped that motorists may thereby be afforded an understanding of many of the important but little-known facts about highway accidents, together with a survey of methods of preventing accidents, and that the various authorities concerned will be given a better appreciation of the problem as a whole.

Throughout the book I have emphasized the paramount importance of the driver. Some may ascribe this to bias resulting from my training as a psychologist. I cannot help but feel, however, that any serious student of the whole field would take the same attitude regardless of his previous training. A major reduction in accidents inevitably depends on driver improvement. We continuall improve the design of new motor cars and roads to order and in the same way, if we apply the full resources of our intelligence, we can implant in drivers new and more suitable modes of behavior...