Citation

No Author(s) Listed. Lancet 1905; 165(4268): 1663.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1905, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

The number of street and road accidents, already appalling enough, may be expected to increase with the ever-increasing amount of traffic and speed of locomotion. A certain proportion of these accidents are no doubt the inevitable accompaniment of human infirmities. The blind man and the deaf person will meet with accidents in the public way, no matter how great the care exercised by all other individuals. It is not, therefore, in thehope of reducing this probably irreducible minimum that these few lines are written but because we believe that attention may profitably be directed to the importance of cultivating what we may call a "sense of traffic." By the possession of such a sense the individual almost instinctively avoids danger. He hears and sees approaching vehicles without consciously employing his eyes or hisears. Without thinking he looks both to the right and. to the left before he crosses a road and does not step off the kerbstone before his course is safe before him. It is the absence of a "sense of traffic" that leaves ladies fluttering half way across a road and the possession of the "sense of traffic" that allows the city man to wander apparently unconcerned among the turmoil of traffic at the Mansion House or Ludgate-circus. Every town dweller should cultivate his "sense of traffic." At firstthis means that he will take every step in a crowded thoroughfare with a reasoned consciousness. He will neverthink of his business or his pleasure while he is in the street but only of the way in which he is going, of what is before him, of what is on either side of him, and of what he is leaving behind him. At every crossing he will settlehis course, so to speak, and look out for dangers from every point of the compass. After very few weeks of this careful self-regulation he will develop the " sense of traffic." Without knowing it he will see and hear and realiseall that moves about him. He will automatically avoid collision and it will be as impossible for him to take a step at the wrong time as it was formerly difficult for him to take it at the right one. He will at the same time preserve his person and lighten the labours of the policeman. The street accidents of London occur to those who have no " sense of traffic" ; it is important for the public weal that every citizen should realise the potential faculty within him and not rest satisfied until it is cultivated to a high degree. Led by the hand of a parent who has the "sense of traffic" " the young child can be taught to develop the quality for himself. The child will no longer be a danger to the driver, the motorist, the cyclist, and himself, and the woman crossing a city thoroughfare will avoid the palpitations of her own heart and the anxious terror that she now too often strikes in the hearts of her beholders.

Language: en