What’s Happening on the Highways?
WITH the arrival of summer vacation, people in north Germany take to the autobahns and head for recreation areas in the south. Last July 31 this resulted in Germany’s worst traffic jam in history. Traffic heading toward Munich stretched bumper to bumper for over a hundred miles! And just that one day fifty people were killed and 180 were seriously injured on Germany’s superhighways.
In 1970 over 19,000 persons died and half a million were injured on roads in Germany. The annual traffic death toll is nearing 20,000 in Japan, with another million injured! In France over 15,000 were killed in auto accidents in 1970. And in the same year, 55,200 died and over five million were injured in the United States—170,000 of whom were crippled for life.
Thus each year well over 100,000 persons are killed and more than six and a half million are injured on the highways—in just four countries!
Such figures are staggering, almost too great to conceive. They mean that, in these four countries, every five minutes someone is killed in a traffic accident, and about every five seconds someone is injured. The dead, if laid head to toe, would stretch about 115 miles! And the injured would reach some 7,000 miles—over a quarter of the way around the earth!
Slaughter on the highways often far outstrips that on the battlefield. During World War II the United States suffered 291,557 battle deaths. But from 1965 to 1970 about 320,000 Americans died in traffic accidents—nearly 30,000 more deaths on the highways than during the worst war in human history! Each year more Americans die on the country’s highways than have been killed in battle in ten years of fighting in Vietnam.
Highway traffic also endangers life in another way, by producing fantastic volumes of air pollutants. Each year automobiles spew some 25 million tons of invisible carbon monoxide into the air in just ten city areas of the United States. This sickens people and slowly kills them. Dr. H. Richard Weinerman, professor of medicine and public health, called the automobile “Public Health Enemy No. 1” in the United States.
Some persons are even more outspoken about the automobile’s threat to man. “I once wrote that the invention of the automobile was one of the greatest disasters to have befallen mankind,” said British economist Ezra J. Mishan recently, but added: “I have had time since to reflect on this statement and to revise my judgment to the effect that the automobile is the greatest disaster to have befallen mankind.”
Yet the automobile is still considered by many the zenith in transportation. In fact, life-styles and communities have been so built around it that in some places there is no adequate alternative means of transportation. So, man has worked himself into a situation from which he finds it almost impossible to escape. Though the atmosphere, and man’s health, are being ruined by the pollution, the convenience of automobile transportation is given priority.
Actually, the commitment to automobile travel becomes greater each year. In 1940 the United States spent less than $1.8 thousand million on road construction, but by the end of the 1960’s some $11 thousand million was being spent yearly. And what about the future?
State highway commissioners want annual expenditures to be nearly doubled. In 1970 they proposed a fifteen-year road program that would cost $320 thousand million! This program would provide 53,000 miles of new highways, improve existing roads and replace thousands of bridges. Also, about $29 thousand million of the proposed sum would go for the completion of the 42,500-mile Interstate Highway System.
This highway system is eventually to connect most major cities, and make possible swift driving from coast to coast and border to border without a traffic light. When it was begun in 1956, it was called the greatest public-works project in history. The cost was estimated at $27 thousand million, and 1971 was set as the year for completion. However, the project is now only 75 percent complete, and it has been calculated that it will cost eventually about $70 thousand million.
It is almost unbelievable the rate at which road building is proceeding. Germany set the pattern for modern superhighways when, back in 1929, she began construction of her autobahns. By the outbreak of World War II she had completed a 1,260-mile network of these superhighways. Now, in the United States alone, the land paved over each year is greater than the entire state of Rhode Island! But how wise is that? Has man seriously considered how this affects the earth’s processes of air cleaning by means of vegetation?
Although it may not be apparent, some success has been realized in making highway travel safer. In the United States the death toll would be nearly three times as high as it is now if the rate of fatalities per mile traveled were the same as in 1934. The number of traffic deaths actually dropped by more than a thousand in a recent year—from 56,400 in 1969 to 55,200 in 1970. Why?
A number of factors have apparently been responsible. Safer automobile construction is one—steering columns that collapse in a crash, windshield glass that crumbles instead of shatters, and shoulder harnesses that have been required in all new cars since 1968. Also, improvements in highway construction, including grooved sections to jar awake sleepy drivers. This progress is commendable. But is it really the whole solution?
No; far-reaching changes are needed in man’s whole attitude toward life and his fellowman. You can improve your lot and that of people around you by showing keen concern for others when you are behind the wheel of a car. But, as for the ruining of the earth and the slaughter of human life as a result of what takes place on the highways—it will take God’s new order really to correct it.