Liberal Democrat Voice records the good news that the statistics for fatalities in road traffic accidents continue to show a steady drop. It quotes the following figures:1994-8 - 3,578 (average)Incredibly, there were far more fatalities than this each year back in the 1930s.
1999 - 3,423
2000 - 3,409
2001 - 3,450
2002 - 3,431
2003 - 3,508
2004 - 3,221
2005 - 3,201
2006 - 3,172
2007 - 2,946
A couple of years ago I reviewed Ian Grimshaw's biography of Leslie Hore-Belisha in Liberal Democrat News:
Few now appreciate the carnage that reigned in the early years of motoring. Hore-Belisha himself, as a former journalist with an eye for a headline, referred to it as “mass murder”. In 1934, the year he took office, 7,343 people were killed on the roads.
5 comments:
Of course, it's hard to know what the cause is by fatality statistics. Roads, and driving habits, may be more dangerous while fatalities have dropped if - as has happened - safety features in cars have become more prevalent.
I was in a serious car accident two years ago now, in which I was entirely unharmed due to the car's roll cage. Had the same crash happened about a decade ago, I'd have been dead. C'est la vie.
Maybe they all died by having the air sucked out of their lungs at 30mph...:)
I did notice though, around the time of the local elections this year, during which a local campaign group was lobbying all the candidates for a universal 20mph limit across Oxford, that the Oxford Times's "75 years ago today" slot mentioned that Oxford got the country's first universal 30mph limit back then. SO I guess that must have been in reaction to something.
If you take away the three-ems cases (middleaged male motorbikers), I wonder what the total now is? Anon's story resonates, as a member of my family and a family friend were killed in 1973 in a car basically designed in the early 1960s. Having to view the wreck and seeing how it came apart was not pleasant. We should be doing a great deal better.
"If you take away the three-ems cases (middleaged male motorbikers), I wonder what the total now is?"
Also take away young drivers killing themselves and their friends - especially the cases where no other vehicle was involved, so the driver has little to blame but their own inadequate judgement of prevailing conditions etc.
This is something difficult to believe I figure out there were more risks because the machines weren't adequate for certain roads, ti would be the only one explanation for me
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