SWEEPING

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 156, 30 December 1938, Page 14

SWEEPING

TRAFFIC OFFENDERS

INCOMPETENCE TO DRIVE

"Not one,of a hundred of the drivers coming into traffic courts has learned how to drive his car with competence, tactfulness, arid care for the other fellow,'' said. Dr. Lowell S. Selling, director of the psycopathic clinic of the Recorder's Court, Detroit, in reporting to a highway conference at the University of Michigan. His conclusion was based on an examination of hundreds of drivers in the clinic.

"Many of the drivers involved in traffic offences are insane," Dr. Selling has found. "Many are dangerously feeble minded, many are illiterate, and while many, of course, are relatively normal, their thinking processes about driving are bad."

More than half of those -examined knew the laws by rote, but had no idea of how they should be carried over into practice, he said. When shown, on a specially constructed city model, a car 'that was violating the law they could not perceive that a law was being violated.

"Ordinary psychological tests, such as those for reaction, time, vision, colour vision, and hearing, cannot weed out the accident-prone drivers," he holds, \-but drivers with defects in some of these traits may be perfectly safe drivers provided they are aware of their weakness."