OCR Text |
Show Stay On The Safe Side "It pays to be on the safe side!' So goes a familiar old slogan. On streets and highways, where paint or other markings are liberally lib-erally displayed to clearly designate des-ignate the safe side for automobiles, automo-biles, this truth would seem difficult dif-ficult to ignore. Yet, more than 5,000 deaths and over '100,000 injuries in-juries are caused each year by drivers who take chances on the wrong side of the road. There is a growing tendency among drivers to disregard the "life lines of the highways" that is hard to understand, because every motorist with sense enough to drive should know and obey the safety rule that solid lines must never be crossed. Last year 1600 more drivers lost their lives, or caused the death of others, by violating wrong-side-of-the-road rules passing at the crest of a hill, on curves, on the open highway at high speeds, and on the streets of cities, towns and villages than the 3400 victims of this illegal ille-gal habit that' were counted in 1948. In the past three years, injuries in-juries from crossing the highway high-way "life lines" increased about 1500 from 94,000 in. 1949 to 110,000 last year. Nearly all head-on collisions, the worst crashes seen on the highways, result from driving on the wrong side of the road. About 250 lives were lost in 1951 in multiple death traffic accidents causing five or more deaths each, virtually all of which were head on collissions. These avoidable tragedies comprised about one-fourth one-fourth of the nation's catastrophes catastro-phes of all kinds that year. After speeding and drinking-and drinking-and driving, traveling on the wrong side of the road probably claims the greatest number of traffic accident victims each year. It accounts for about one of every six fatalities and more than one of every seven injuries. It is high time for the police and courts to remind motorists of the old fashioned slogan with which we began. |