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Five thousand more people were killed ;n vehicular traffic accidents during 1964 in the United States than in 1963.
This is an increase of 12% in one year.
The trend of the past few years points inescapably to the expectation that during 1965 traffic accidents will take well over 50,000 lives.
An equivalent death toll at sea would require the sinking of 15 to 20 giant ocean liners with all hands aboard. In the air it would require around 500 jet airplane crashes — about 40 every month or 10 every week.
One does not need much imagination to predict the national uproar that would occur if jet airplanes started to fall out of the sky at the rate of more than one a day! Yet each year we watch the death toll from traffic accidents reach appallingly high totals, apparently helpless to stop the slaughter.
Actually, of course, we aren’t helpless. A conservative estimate fixes the cause of at least %/\ of these accidents on driver error — mistakes drivers themselves could avoid by not speeding, by not driving recklessly, by obeying the rules of the road, and by yielding the right of way — even when in doubt.
Sooner or later the traffic death and injury toll will reach proportions the nation will no longer consider tolerable, and strong measures will be taken to reverse the trend. Clearly, the more that drivers discipline themselves voluntarily when behind the wheel, the less severe such measures will have to be.
77.3%