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Sunday March 25, 2007

Nation on Film

Last Monday, I found myself watching a documentary about the car (on BBC2), narrated by Sir David Jason1. It was part of the Open University's Nation on Film series, which is made up of professional and amateur movie footage, using a wide variety of film to illustrate historical themes.

I love vintage film collections of this type, (even though I have little interest in the history of the car as such), in the same way that I love Stitchcraft magazine. They provide a delightful insight on contemporary society of the time - even when they are presenting an idealised view of their world (such as in an advertisement) rather than picturing real contemporary life. However, apart from it being very interesting, it threw in what was for me the most astonishing statistic - so much so that I have had to trawl the web to check up that I had heard correctly. Here it is:

In the early 1930s, there were up to 1½ million cars on the road in the UK, and there were more than 7,000 road deaths per year - about twice the present level, when traffic levels are 12 times higher. I feel I must further emphasise that these are actual deaths, not proportional to number of cars, or population, or miles driven.
A c t u a l    d e a t h s.
It certainly caught my attention.

This terrible statistic led to the 1934 Road Traffic Act, which was responsible for introducing a number of safety measures including:

  • reintroduction of a 30mph speed limit in built-up areas
  • "a code of conduct for the roads (the Highway Code),
  • the compulsory driving test2 (fee 10 shillings), from 1935,
  • stipulation that drivers had to be aged at least 17,
  • Belisha beacons3 for pedestrian crossings, and
  • "cat's eyes" , which were invented in 1933.

According to propaganda at least, one of the most effective safety measures was the painting of a white line down the centre of the road. Seat belts were not introduced until the 1950s and for those too young to remember, they became law in 1983.

In the 1930s, safety glass was made compulsory for windscreens - after "terrible injuries" had been caused by accidents involving cars with ordinary glass in their windows. This leads me to comment on Smeed, (who had a fatalistic view of traffic flow), and His Law.
Smeed's Law is an empirical rule relating traffic fatalities to motor vehicle registrations and country population. His basic proposition is that people will drive recklessly until the number of deaths reaches the maximum they can tolerate. When the number exceeds that limit, they drive more carefully.
Depressing eh? But you may be cheered by the fact that the simple graph expressing his original formula is not longer a good fit with the data.4

Moving on - I find I am eagerly anticipating the Nation on Film scheduled for April 2nd, (19:30 BBC2), "The Ramsden Archive", which tells us the story of a newly-discovered amateur archive that sheds new light on life in post-war Britain. "For 20 years, husband and wife Betty and Cyril Ramsden recorded the world around them. They captured middle-class life in the north of England. Their rich celluloid legacy challenges the clichéd view of 50s Britain as a decade of dreariness."

Footnotes:

1 I was amused to read apparent criticism on the choice of narrator in various forum entries saying "where did he get that accent?!" (duh - he's an ACTOR...) - one participant did gently point out that it is probably his real accent, and that Sir David probably does not actually speak like Del Boy, or Pop Larkin. The critics are obviously too young to remember the voice of the suave and intelligent "Danger Mouse" , which was always good for a pub quiz question or two on Sir David.
Click to hear those magic words: "Penfold Shush!"

2 REQUIREMENTS OF THE 1935 DRIVING TEST

  • Provisional licence (from 1947)
  • Eyesight test
  • Highway Code questions
  • Emergency Stop
  • Arm signals
  • Reverse left
  • Turn in the road
  • 'General driving'

(Source: Driving Standards Agency)

3 The Belisha beacon is named after Leslie Hore-Belisha (1895-1957), the Minister of Transport who introduced them in 1934. I was, again, amused to find from contemporary sources that in the 1930s there was the same public hostility to pedestrian crossings and Belisha beacons as there is towards traffic cameras today, even though it was, and is, empirically evident that they are an effective safety measure.
Even after the introduction of the crossings, the legal point, on who has right of way on a crossing, remained unclear. In June 1938, a judge decided that a pedestrian knocked down on a pedestrian crossing had no claim for compensation because he had been standing on the pavement a few moments earlier and "not presenting the appearance of a man about to cross the road".

4 Smeed's Law merely defines the number of deaths that we find psychologically tolerable. At the time he proposed this (1949) the evidence supported the theory, but now, the actual statistics deviate widely from the maths, suggesting that his relationships are spurious. However, there is still a valid argument that the basic psychological influence is still there, but has merely been masked by what is today the overwhelming (mathematically exponential) influence of improvement in car safety through technological advances.
Vorsprung durch Technik, and all that....
A paper by Adams in 1987 states: "....the death rate per vehicle has fallen enormously as exposure to traffic has increased. The parameters of [Smeed's] original model do not fit the experience of every country exactly, but the model still represents a very useful generalisation of the relationship between death rates and exposure."

Posted by Christina at 10:22 AM. Category: Art and Culture

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