Another deadly, though little recognised, factor in the motor slaughter may be mentioned here: the element of sadism that at times appears in the behaviour, as it is not infrequently heard in the conversation, of certain of the drivers: the satisfaction these drivers find in the practice or the thought of intimidating the other road users. No one but a sentimentalist or a hypocrite would deny that in the present conditions on the roads some degree of sadism is inevitable in drivers with ill-balanced minds- and clearly these are not few- or that it inevitably becomes active in moments of stress or irritation. It is commonly said by drivers that driving a car induces in the driver "a sense of power," and, in these ill-balanced minds, this sense of power is extended and distorted to become a sense of power over the lives and safety of the other road-users. No one can have failed to see at some time on the roads some instance of deliberate bullying by a driver of other road-users- cyclists provide especially easy targets- and there have in-fact, been cases in which drivers have been convicted of this. Precisely how many "accidents"-have been directly or indirectly caused by a sudden sadistic impulse in the mind of a driver cannot be guessed, but it cannot be small. The powers of life and death inherent in a car are far too great to be allowed to anyone except under thestrictest supervision and control, and they must not be allowed at all to persons with ill-balanced minds.
III. SPEED AND DEMOCRACY "But" shouts the indignant motor propagandist, amid no doubt encouraging cries from considerable numbers of drivers "you are missing the point, my pedestrian friend, with your talk about sadism, the intoxication of speed and all the rest of it. Why don't you look around you? We are living in an high-speed age. We must have speed and more speed." "Of course. That is the second, or, if you like, the first reason why speed must be controlled. In fact, when I look around me I find intolerable delays imposed on great numbers of people, including, probably, you yourself, by precisely this condition of uncontrolled speed. Certainly we live in an age of speed and more speed. But we also, live in an age of democracy and more democracy, and speed is much too valuable a commodity to be restricted to the few." 31
In the first place, speeding is one of the major causes, perhaps the major cause, of traffic congestion. Experiments carried out by the American Road Builders' Association have shown that, after allowing adequate tail spacing, the maximum speed to permit the maximum number of vehicles to pass a given point is 23 m.p.h. The total at this speed in an hour was 2,600. At 40 m.p.h. this number was reduced to 1,760*. In an average fairly busy street with numerous inevitable stoppages and obstacles, to say nothing of crossing pedestrians, a much lower speed is obviously necessary, and anything in excess of this leads to traffic jams. But, even more, speeding imposes intolerable delays on the rest of the community. Indeed, if some of the motor interests plans for " high speed traffic " were carried out the entire life of the community over big areas of the country would cease to exist. For example, the proposal has been put forward -as a suggested experiment- in the Interim Report of the Ministry of Transport Road Safety Committee, that pedestrians should be forbidden to cross roads of more than 40 feet in width within a hundred yards of a pedestrian crossing. (It is put forward without even any guarantee as to the siteing of the crossings). Of course, in busy areas, the proposal could not be carried out, for the simple reason that the crossing pedestrians would form a continuous barrier in the traffic, or, if they were held up from time to time, would overflow into the roadway and soon create a still more formidable barrier. Nor could it be carried out in many other conditions, e.g. along tram routes, where the "stops" would necessarily be sited at other points in the roadway and where there would, therefore, be pedestrians crossing at other points. But even where it could be carried out, it would impose delays on the general life of the community far greater than anything resulting from the most rigid control of the speed of the vehicles, since the pedestrians would be forced to walk up to 200 yards each time they crossed the roads. This is to say nothing of the great hardships that would be imposed on certain classes of the pedestrians e.g. Infirm persons, mothers with children, or shopping baskets, etc. or of the losses that would be imposed in shopping areas on the shopkeepers. It is the final injustice of proposals of this kind that the life of local communities should be held up mainly for the sake of long-distance traffic. In a high speed age, at least as much as the motorist, * "Accidents and Their Prevention," by H. M. Vernon (Cambridge Unversity P-, 1936), pl~. 14-23.