Road Accidents and Research

Abstract

THE persistence of road accidents is evidence of a sociological disorder. They are the painful symptoms, not the malady. An organized attempt to diagnose the disease has yet to be made. Even the symptoms (namely, the accidents) have hitherto been neither recorded nor analysed scientifically. Hence references to statistical records, though sometimes suggestive, are never convincing. The records hitherto have suffered from the directive given to them by a tendentious supposition—that accidents must be due to avoidable carelessness or malignancy. This was officially imputed to some drivers (road hogs); later to all drivers (lust of speed); later still to lack of care in all road users without exception (pedestrians, cyclists and drivers), that is, the whole community. Before blaming the 'human factor', inquiry should have been made as to whether the conditions in which road users have to move are such that no large group of human beings could, by taking any reasonable care, negotiate all the emergencies that present themselves.