Some Things Never Change: Speed Kills

In the years when Carswell Air Force Base was headquarters of the 7th Bomb Wing, its flight crews often on ready alert and its parking aprons bristling with B-52s and B-58s, a conspicuous sign warned airmen driving out its gates: “CAUTION! You are about to enter the most dangerous area in the world - a public highway.”

The automobile is America’s symbol of affluence, the ubiquitous emblem of our freedom and mobility. We’ve made it an extension of our individual personalities. We pamper it, abuse it, curse it, go in debt for it and refuse to do without it. It can be a family’s most useful servant. It is also, quite sadly, our country’s deadliest killer.

Every year, more young Americans die from traffic accidents than from any other cause. While politicians fret and stew about the rampant growth of violent crime, the car claims six times as many victims annually as does the gun. We are outraged, as we should be, by the wanton barbarities of drive-by shootings. Still, easily twice as many peaceful pedestrians strolling American sidewalks are run down by automobiles, and we hear no outcry.

While throngs protested the Vietnam War, more Americans went right on dying from automobile accidents each year than that gory conflict claimed in 10 years of slaughter. Nobody seemed to worry much about this far more lethal menace.

If our public decisions are indicators of sentiment, we seem almost proud of the death toll. The Texas Legislature in its last session voted to raise the permissive speed limit to 70 mph. A few months after higher speeds went into effect, grisly statistics revealed a 13 percent increase in fatalities. State authorities averred that maybe someone should look into whether there might, just possibly, be some causal connection.

Abundant evidence existed. Nobody bothered to consult it. For many years, through the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s, the price exacted by highway fatalities remained fairly constant at about 55,000 American lives each year. In the first year after we lowered the speed limit on national highways to 55, the death rate plunged dramatically to 48,000 - a 13 percent drop!

Ironically, the reason for establishing the lower limit was to save energy. The 1979 Arab oil embargo had brought our economy to its knees and shown us how pathetically dependent we’d become on imported petroleum. Energy independence was our battle cry. The reduced speed limit, along with other measures, helped for a while - until we grew complacent and drifted back into our somniferous fog of self-indulgence. Congress lifted the 55 mph limit and abandoned most of our bold energy initiatives. Today we’re back where we were, buying more foreign oil, driving faster and killing more Americans in traffic fatalities. Put simply, speed kills.

Now a Texas legislator from Longview named Tommy Merritt wants the state’s Lottery Commission to sell “speeding coupons.” I suppose he’s serious. Under his bill, a driver could buy a book of coupons, trading one to the arresting officer for immunity each time he’s caught speeding. Buy a license to violate the law! Pay now and speed at will! Maybe this is part of a new Texas macho pose, like encouraging everybody to wear a concealed weapon.

The Lottery Commission surely would be the appropriate agency to administer that program. Make it all one big game of chance - how often you get caught, and whether somebody gets killed by your speeding. A lot of fun! What’s the thrill in gambling for mere money when you can gamble for human life?

This may have approximated the inchoate sentiment of two joy-riding teen-age drivers on March 26 as they raced one another down a busy road in nearby Arlington. One ran a truck off the road. Its driver, a pregnant woman, was killed. Her premature baby boy, his birth artificially induced, lived for a week and died.

No, they didn’t intend to kill. Hardly any driver does. Yet almost every day I see hedonistic punks in expensive new cars racing one another at breakneck speeds while darting in and out of traffic on the freeway. Stifling an impulse to anger, I remember how bullet-proof I felt at 17. My reflexes were perfect, I told myself then. I could handle a speeding car. What insufferable idiocy! Only by God’s grace were my life and those of innocent others saved from my insolence. But even then I never raced with another driver in urban traffic.

The way we drive says something basic about our mental maturity. It’s an expression of our manners, of our personal responsibility, of what we’re really like inside ourselves behind that impersonalizing ton of metal. The driver who slows down and lets others into an entrance or exit lane is a good public citizen. If not for him, there’d be more frustration, more anger and panic, more mayhem. The one who speeds up and cuts others off, denying access, is basically self-centered and unhappy, a public menace.

There are basic rules that, if we observe them, can save lives, including our own. The main one is common courtesy. “Drive Friendly,” exhorted the old Texas slogan. It’s a far better rule, whatever its grammar, than the arrogant bravura that glorifies rudeness. Some towns are known, and abhorred, for the incivility of their drivers. Let’s resolve never to let that happen in our hometowns.