“Risk-Taking on the Road”

George Will

Thinking he heard thunder, my neighbour went to close his car windows. Actually, he had heard a commonplace tragedy, the making of a statistic. A woman died and a man nearly died in the occurrence shocking our routine, an automobile accident.

The car veered out of control on Connecticut Avenue, hit trees, fragmented, and broke in half Three of us arrived immediately. Emergency equipment arrived quickly. Cleaning up took hours.

In 1900, this “village”, six miles from the White House, was where Washingtonians came for summer breezes. Today, it is a small incorporated area near the centre of a sprawling metropolis, adjacent to Washington‘s city line. It is divided by Connecticut Avenue, which passes around a traffic circle as it enters Maryland. Trees on the circle are heavily scarred from crashes. Crumpling steel and crying sirens are common sounds here as on many urban thoroughfares.

Increasingly, American driving reflects, I think, the sublimated fury of persons heading for infuriating jobs, the animal spirits of persons whose lives allow little scope for such spirits. As Daniel P. Moynihan wrote years ago, the automobile is “both a symbol of aggression and a vehicle thereof...It is a prime agent of risk-taking in a society that still values risk-taking, but does not provide many outlets.”

The endless epidemic of accidents is one of the nation‘s gravest public health problems. Automobile deaths and injuries have costs beyond counting and are a special plague to the young. Of every 100,000 males age fifteen, about 1,100 will die in accidents, most involving automobiles, before age twenty-five—a death rate twenty times worse than polio at its worst.