safety
Page 57
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What price road safety?
by A. E. Teer,
Road safety officer. Cadbury-Schweppes, and secretary, AIRSO.
• It is gratifying to know that members of the Association of Industrial Road Safety Officers are to be invited to contribute toC/14's monthly safety column. And before we start, it might be as well to take a look at what we mean by safety, in this context.
To achieve complete road safety we would have to lock up all our vehicles and stay indoors, but while we take the practical view that vehicles will continue to move, we must face some risks. These arise from four main sources:
1. The roads themselves. Whether these are motorways or narrow country lanes they allhave their individual imperfections; but they are static and real, and our job as drivers is to interpret what we see.
2. The weather. British weather, fickle and treacherous as we well know, was here long before we were born, and will outlast us all. Why are we so often amazed by it? What is more obvious than fog? We should learn not to be surprised by rain, snow, ice and fog but to take account of the effects which these hazards can produce, 3. The vehicles. These, quite properly, vary in behaviour and performance according to the purpose for which they were designed. Too often we use them as though they should all perform alike. Worse, we fail to make allowances for the state of wear or standard of maintenance.
4. The drivers. No one paragraph could sum up the requirements for a good driver. Like safety, "good" is a relative word. Most experienced drivers know how to keep free of accidents, but too many of them have the uncomfortable feeling that this is largely a matter of luck. They have the impression that they are really at the mercy of bad roads, treacherous weather, unsafe machines and, worst of all, the other man.
To a certain;extent, all of this is true. But AIRSO firmly 'believes that an experienced driver can be , trained to tackle all these hazards systematically to such good purpose that he finally comes to believe that they are within his power to control and that the other man is, after all, the one he sees every day in his shaving mirror.
We hope to discuss in this column some of the ways in which the driver can lighten the burden of chance and uncertainty under which so many travel.; We would like to take the hit out of hit-and-miss, to make uneventful journeys the nqtmal routine, and, dare I mention it. restore a Ifttle of the courteous behaviour which was onte,the hallmark of a good driver.
Statistically Or roads are less dangerous than when I began my motoring career. Then, there were about lm vehicles on our roads and we were killing people at the rate of 5,000 a year. Now, with around 14m vehicles we kill about 7,000. :Even so. I don't regard that as a statistic about which we can be complacent.