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Show Startling Death Rate From Auto Accidents "39,000 DEAD 1,300,000 INJURED AT BALTIMORE AREA WIPED OUT! ! !" A headline of that sort would horrify the world, yet indications of the first six months' traffic toll forecast that many people will be killed and injured in automobile auto-mobile accidents in the United States this year. Based on mothly trends in motor vehicle accidents, which recur annually in the same general gene-ral pattern, the 15,750 traffic deaths in the first six months of 1946 indicate that we will set on a new high in highway horror. When the previous high in traffic deaths was set in 1941, almost 93 per cent of the vehicles ve-hicles involved in fatal accidents were in apparently good condition. condi-tion. By 1945 the number of vehicle defects contributing to accident cause had risen to 18 per cent of all traffic fatalities. This year the average car on the , road is more than seven years old. According to a nation-wide check of some 3,000,000 automobiles, auto-mobiles, just completed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, almost a third of these cars are being driven with obvious and dangerous mechanical me-chanical defects. That's the national na-tional average the percentage rises to ore than one-half of the cars in some of our states with the greatest number of automobiles. automo-biles. According to the National Safety Safe-ty Council, from V-J Day to the end of 1945, traffic deaths rose suffering, no more needless 38 per cent, compared with the same period in 1944. The President's Highway Safety Safe-ty Conference declared that: "One of the most positive challenges chal-lenges to public action in the United States today is the need to reduce traffic accidents . . . With the increasing use of highways high-ways in the years ahead the problem will be magnified." This is confirmed by studies of the National Safety Council which indicate that nearly 500,-000 500,-000 people will be killed in automobile auto-mobile accidents in the United States in the next ten years and more than that unless accident acci-dent prevention efforts keep pace with the increase in travel. "There is no more tragic waste of human lives, no more unnecessary un-necessary background to human source of economic loss than traf-1 fic accidents," The President's! conference found, and concluded: "If there was ever a need for unselfish un-selfish devotion to a single cause it exists today in our quest for lighway safety." Current fug-ures fug-ures seem to support that conclusion. |