“ONE EVERY 14 SECONDS”

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 235, 23 December 1927, Page 8

“ONE EVERY 14 SECONDS ”

ACTUARIES of those most careful institutions, the insurance companies, have been preparing estimates of next year’s motor killings. With great skill, it is the practice of these actuaries to estimate the probabilities of the average duration of life, and place them down in figures neat and cold, so that the insurance companies may work on a safe margin. It is icily estimated by those actuaries that there will be 25,000 deaths and 800,000~ injuries in the United States next year from motor-car accidents, this being based on the record of the last two years, during which period someone was either killed or injured every 14 seconds, one death occurring for every 1,000 cars. At this rate, the destructiveness of war is not infinitely more deadly that the devastation of peace. We slow-going New Zealanders have not yet attained to the distinction of killing someone every 14 seconds with our motor-ears. But there is no need to despair. The toll of the motor grows week by week and year by year, and with our fine concrete roads and our lack of supervision over sjieeding motorists, there is no reason to doubt that, judged on a population basis, we shall eventually compare more than favourably with the United States in the number of “kills.”

Only one thing may prevent this. Our courts of justice may weakly yield to the unreasoning demands of pedestrians to have the public highways made safer for them, and as unreasoningly punish motorists who carelessly kill wayfarers who are insufficiently swift or aerobatic in their movements.