Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The magazine graph was annotated with landmarks in auto safety which identified the technological, commercial, political, and moralistic forces at work. Over the short run they sometimes pushed against each other, but over the long run they collectively pulled the death rate down, down, down. At times there were moral crusades to reduce the carnage, with automobile manufacturers as the villains. In 1965 a young lawyer named Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a j’accuse of the industry for neglecting safety in automotive design. Soon after, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was established and legislation was passed requiring new cars to be equipped with a number of safety features. Yet the graph shows that steeper reductions came before the activism and the legislation, and the auto industry was sometimes ahead of its customers and regulators. A signpost in the graph pointing to 1956 notes, “Ford Motor Company offers the ‘Lifeguard’ package. . . . It includes seatbelts, a padded dash, padded visors, and a recessed steering-wheel hub designed to not turn drivers into a kebab during a collision. It is a sales failure.” It took a decade for those features to become mandatory.

Sprinkled along the slope were other episodes of push and pull among engineers, consumers, corporate suits, and government bureaucrats. At various times, crumple zones, four-wheel dual braking systems, collapsible steering columns, high-mounted center brake lights, buzzing and garroting seat belts, and air bags and stability control systems wended their way from the lab to the showroom. Another lifesaver was the paving of long ribbons of countryside into divided, reflectored, guard-railed, smooth-curved, and broad-shouldered interstate highways. In 1980 Mothers Against Drunk Driving was formed, and they lobbied for higher drinking ages, lowered legal blood alcohol levels, and the stigmatization of drunk driving, which popular culture had treated as a source of comedy (such as in the movies North by Northwest and Arthur). Crash testing, traffic law enforcement, and driver education (together with unintentional boons like congested roads and economic recessions) saved still more lives. A lot of lives: since 1980, about 650,000 Americans have lived who would have died if traffic death rates had remained the same.⁴¹ The numbers are all the more remarkable when we consider that with each passing decade, Americans drove more miles (55 billion in 1920, 458 billion in 1950, 1.5 trillion in 1980, and 3 trillion in 2013), so they were enjoying all the pleasures of leafy suburbs, soccer-playing children, seeing the USA in their Chevrolet, or just cruising down the streets, feeling out of sight, spending all their money on a Saturday night.⁴² The additional miles driven did not eat up the safety gains: automobile deaths per capita (as opposed to per vehicle mile) peaked in 1937 at close to 30 per 100,000 per year, and have been in steady decline since the late 1970s, hitting 10.2 in 2014, the lowest rate since 1917.⁴³

The progress in the number of motorists who arrive alive is not uniquely American. Fatality rates have sunk in other wealthy countries such as France, Australia, and of course safety-conscious Sweden. (I ended up buying a Volvo.) But it can be attributed to living in a wealthy country. Emerging nations like India, China, Brazil, and Nigeria have per capita traffic death rates that are double that of the United States and seven times that of Sweden.⁴⁴ Wealth buys life.

A decline in road deaths would be a dubious achievement if it left us more endangered than we were before the automobile was invented. But life before the car was not so safe either. The pictorial curator Otto Bettmann recounts contemporary accounts of city streets in the horse-drawn era:

“It takes more skill to cross Broadway . . . than to cross the Atlantic in a clamboat.” . . . The engine of city mayhem was the horse. Underfed and nervous, this vital brute was often flogged to exhaustion by pitiless drivers, who exulted in pushing ahead “with utmost fury, defying law and delighting in destruction.” Runaways were common. The havoc killed thousands of people. According to the National Safety Council, the horse-associated fatality rate was ten times the car-associated rate of modern times [in 1974, which is more than double the per capita rate today—SP].⁴⁵