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Show ONE HEARTENING NOTE As the truth about the extent of deaths, injuries and property destruction on our streets and highways in' 1951 pours in from every part of the country, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a heartening note in the whole shameful mess. Yet, there is one fact that offers ' real hope, if we have the plain common sense to put it to work. would be saving motorists at the . same rate as pedestrians, which they most definitely are not. I Thus we come to a logical and , hopeful conclusion. If people ; can be taught to walk safely while they are still going to i school, they can also be taught to drive safely at the same time. People who have devoted their lives to studying the traffic accident ac-cident problem are unanimous in agreeing that safe driver education ed-ucation can produce future generations gen-erations of good drivers who : know how to avoid accidents. Unless we have developed a na- j tional suicidal complex, there- ! fore, we should lose no time in making safe driver education a i part of the required high school I curriculum not in just a few high schools for comparatively few future drivers, but in all high schools .for all students thruout the country. If common decency and common com-mon sense don't demand that this be done, then self-preservation does. t It is the fact that while motorists motor-ists have been busier than ever killing and maiming one another, an-other, the fatality rate for pedestrians pedes-trians in traffic accidents has decreased sharply. The note of hope is not to be found in the fact that many pedestrians still lost their lives under the wheels of motor cars last year, but in a comparison of pedestrian statistics sta-tistics with 20 years ago. - It is all on the good side, and better still is the reason for this change. In 1950, the last year for which the figures are really com-p'ete, com-p'ete, 9400 pedestrians were killed by motor vehicles, which is terrifying enough. But it is nothing like as terrifying as the 15,580 pedestrians who were destroyed de-stroyed by automobiles in 1930. That is a saving of 6500 lives, despite the fact that 20,000,000 more cars travel the road today tluia in 1930. The saving is not enough, to be sure, but it is a trend in the right direction, and it didn't just happen It was planned. About 25 years ago the death rate of children reached such alarming proportions that the grade schools made consistent instruction in how to cross and use the streets and highways ' safely part of its fixed curricu- , lum. Not just a few schools I took u pthis life-saving form of education; all schools did it. -As a result, now only 15 percent of the pedestrians who are killed in traffic accidents are children under 15 years of age, as against j 37 percent in 1930. So here we have undeniable proof that safe- j ty education, when it is done j completely and with determina-' tion, really pays. Furthermore, it stands to rea- ! son that when a person learns to : walk safely in the habit-forming ' school years, that lesson remains ' a good habit thruout life. Some credit must be given, of course, to the traffic lights and other devices that protect pedestrians and motorists alike. But we think most of the credit is due to the fact that a great many modern adults learned the lesson les-son of pedestrian safely along wih reading, writing and arithmetic. arith-metic. If this were not true, the lights and other traffic devices |