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Show NEWSPAPERS OF NATION JOIN IN DRIVE TO CUT MOUNTING AUTO DEATH TOLL The saving of 10,000 lives and prevention of at least 250,000 injuries th's year is the goal of more than 8,000 newspapers thru-out thru-out the United States that have joined in a coast-to coast campaign to halt the mounting horror of motor v.ehicle accidents on America's Amer-ica's streets and highways. Confronted by a staggering total of more than 1,000,000 traf fic dead, with 35,000,000 other men, women and children injured, in-jured, many of them crippled for life, in a mere 52 years of reckless motoring, the press of the nation has adopted a common com-mon program to attack this annual an-nual national calamity on three fronts: 1. Intensive education of drivers. 2. Intensive education, of pedestrians. 3. Intensive insistence upon strict enforcement of traffic laws. Assisting this and the other newspapers in presenting the facts about traffic accidents, and how they can be prevented, will be the famed accident prevention pre-vention department of the Association Asso-ciation of Casualty and Surety Companies, which first' introduced intro-duced safe driver education to the high schools, wrote and published pub-lished the first textbook on that subject, and maintains staffs of safety specialists in New York, Chicago and San Francisco to study constantly the trends and needs of traffic conditions on a countrywide basis. Reducing trattic fatalities by 10,000 and personal injuries by 250,000 this year is a real possibility," pos-sibility," said Thomas N. Boate, acting manager of that nationally nation-ally recognized safety organization. organiza-tion. "It will take the full and united cooperation of the press, of state and municipal officials, of safety organizations, and of the people. We can count on the first three. The public which has most at stake, is the unknown quantity. If they read j and heed, this campaign will be a success; if they don't, it will fail. "That should be a terrifying prospect to every man, woman and child in the country when you remember that, if the toll keeps increasing at its present rate, it will not be long before every person in the country must steel himself or herself to the fact that sooner or later they wiil be hit by an automobile automo-bile hit hard enough to be either injured or killed. It has been 10 years since we had less than 1,000,000 persons injured in traffic accidents in any one year. It only took us 52 years to pile up the horrible toll of one million traffic dead, but the second million may well be reached in half that time, at the rate we are going.. "As a sarting point toward the goal of far fewer accidents, what is needed most is immediate immedi-ate state and local action against moron drivers and unsafe driving driv-ing habits of normal Americans who now kill more than 100 people peo-ple every day, or die themselves in the accidents they cause while violating traffic laws. 1 Last year more than 1,200,000 persons were injured by automobiles. auto-mobiles. The" vast majority of these accidents were caused by 1 carelessness, a great many by j ca1 loused indifference to traffic I laws. Obviously, fullest law observance and enforcement on the highways should become the immediate objective of all states and cities." The newspapers' 1952 traffic safety campaign, which has the full endorsement of aU of the state press and publishers' organizations, or-ganizations, will seek to educate both drivers and pedestrians in the causes of accidents. The No. 1 target will be speeding drivers, driv-ers, whose violations of traffic laws cause half of the automobile automo-bile deaths in a number of states. All safety organizations are urging stringent action against speeders. Another primary pri-mary target will be drinking drivers, who also kill thousands ' of Americans every year and often escape punishment with "slap-on - the - wrist" fines that merely encourage similar violations, viola-tions, according to Mr. Boate. |