ROAD ACCIDENTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 12 December 1939, Page 4

ROAD ACCIDENTS

HEAVY TOLL IN BRITAIN. There can have been few minds that were not shadowed by the thought of some eight hundred British lives lost by the sinking of the battleship Royal Oak. Will a similar shadow be cast by. the discovery that more than that number lost their lives in September through road accidents in Britain? asks the “Manchester Guardian.” It is, of course, a type of comparison that has been made before. Even in normal times and with street lighting at full strength between six and seven thousand people a year are killed on. the roads of Britain, and well over two hundred thousand are injured; in the whole of the South African War the killed in action were returned as 5.774 and the wounded as less than 21,000. The grievous thing about the September figures is that they have been doubled by lack of care during the black-out. A year ago the return of killed for the same month was 554; last month it was 1,130, of whom 107 were children under the age of fifteen. If anything approaching five hundred people had been indiscriminately killed in an air raid, the country would have been roused ifrom one end to the other, yet without any contribution at all from enemy action in a single month we have added that number to the already sufficiently shocking total of normal deaths on the road.