With safety built in, the driver has less to worry about. Thus, & highway which is built to be safe proves also to be more efficient. Let me illustrate how we can build safety into highways. If the roadway is divided, with an adequate medial strip, head-on collisions are virtually eliminated and headlight glare is no serious problem. If shoulders are wide and firm, "running off roadway" accidents are reduced. If no pedestrian can get on the highway, no pedestrian can be hit-and so on.

At the dawn of the motor age we had to be content with a highway on which it was possible, with skill and patience, to reach our destination without an accident. Now the public demands highways on which it shall be as difficult as possible to have an accident.

What we all want is an adequate, efficient highway transportation system by which persons and goods can move from point A to point B, quickly, comfortably, economically, and in one piece. Anything that interferes with such movement, whether it be an accident, congestion, or other delay is a symptom of inefficiency in the system.

The elements that make up the highway transportation system are roads, vehicles, drivers and sometimes pedestrians. When the road, the vehicle, the driver or pedestrian misbehaves, to that extent the system breaks down. A single accident may involve all of these elements, as when a driver in a hurry goes too fast, with brakes out of adjustment, on a slippery road, skids and hits the side of a narrow bridge or perhaps hits a pedestrian who stepped onto the roadway without looking.

If any one of these three elements had been lacking—if the road had been wider or less slippery, if the brakes had been in good condition, if the driver or pedestrian had been more careful-the accident would not have occurred. Back in 1938 a research report made for and published by the Bureau of Public Roads declared that:

* by far the majority (of the accidents studied) were the result of a combination of causes, the elimination of any one of which would have prevented the accident.

Thus, we do not try to ascribe each accident to a single cause or to say that a certain number or percentage of accidents are "caused" by bad roads, bad cars, or bad drivers or pedestrians because the causes are interrelated and overlapping. Instead, we try to record and study all the circumstances of each accident and to remedy not one but all of them. Thus, we know that a highway built to safe specifications will make some types of accidents much less likely, will make it a lot easier to drive safely.

No highway, however, can be foolproof. Sometimes a superhighway has had a bad accident record because of the delusion that there was no need for a speed limit or for policing. When, on the other hand, the Pennsylvania, New Jersey and other turnpikes have added good policing to safe design, the result has been a death rate about half the national average.

We need, on all highways, control of the driver through good police and court work and good driver-licensing. We need to develop skill and self-control, through driver-training in high school and through continuous public education. But education is a slow process. We must design and build highways to be as safe as possible for drivers as they are.

When, as in recent years, the building of safety into highways has lagged far behind the travel volume, the burden of keeping the traffic moving, and moving safely, has fallen on the enforcers and educators. The traffic engineers have done their best, through signs, signals, oneway streets and the like, to extract the last ounce of safe capacity out of existing roads and streets. These approaches will always be necessary but if we depend on them alone for further reduction of the annual toll, or even to keep it at the present level with constantly increasing traffic, these efforts will be more and more costly and less and less productive of results.

The highways, in short, must also do their part. The Bureau of Public Roads and the State highway departments, by and large, have done their best with available resources. Our plea today is that in the further development of the national highway program the aim be not merely more roads but better, safer roads, as an indispensable element in a truly efficient highway transportation system.

(The charts referred to in Mr. Williams' statement are as follows:)

Mr. DEMPSEY. Our next witness will be Mr. Carl E. Fritts, vice president, Automotive Safety Foundation.

You may submit your statement for the record, Mr. Fritts, and then make any comments on it that you want to, so in the event we are called back for quorum we will not delay the proceedings so long.

Mr. FRITTS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. With your permission, I will delete portions of my testimony in the presentation. I do want to show you some charts.

Mr. DEMPSEY. That is perfectly all right.

STATEMENT OF CARL E. FRITTS, VICE PRESIDENT, AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY FOUNDATION

Mr. FRITTS. Just by way of qualification, I have been engaged in highway engineering for some 30 years, including 20 years with the Department of Highways of the State of Washington. I am now vice president in charge of engineering for the Automotive Safety Foundation. The foundation is a nonprofit organization, created and supported by some 490 companies in the automotive and allied industries. It is dedicated to education and research for safe and efficient highway transportation.

During the past 9 years the foundation has made available technical assistance to 19 States by directing engineering studies of highway needs, principally for State legislative committees. Currently we are working in Kentucky, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Tennessee. At the request of your committee, I am appearing today to testify on the relationship of highway improvement to the accident problem."

The goal of highway improvement is economical and efficient transportation service. Analysis shows that when highway facilities are constructed in such a manner as to achieve maximum benefits in transportation service, they also provide the highest degree of safety.

Major physical factors contribute materially to the problem of preventing accidents. One of these factors is the outmoded design that exists on a large proportion of all highway systems. Another very serious problem is the lack of space for the number of vehicles using many section of our principal routes and the forecast of future use makes this problem one of primary significance.

More than 50 percent of the Federal-aid primary system has the original design, created more than 20 years ago. Thirty percent of the system was constructed prior to 1930. These designs were created when average operating speeds were much less than that of the last few years. Also, they were created when there was considerably less commercial use of the systems. They are being well maintained, and drivers are attempting to move at today's rates of speed over those facilities which were originally designed for speeds of 10 to 15 miles an hour or less. Overdriving of these old facilities increases the hazard. The only means of solution to this problem without the imposition of legal restrictions which retard movement and without sacrificing lives in accidents is to supply adequate design features.

Some of the fundamental features of adequate design are:

1. The number of lanes must be sufficient to provide space for the vehicles and ease of movement for traffic. As congestion increases, accidents go up because drivers take chances in trying to overcome its effects.

2. The lanes themselves should be wide enough to permit vehicles to pass with safety at reasonable speeds. Today we have many commercial vehicles operating in the traffic stream whose overall width is 8 feet. Passenger vehicles are 612 to 7 feet. It is easy to visualize the inherent hazard of expecting these vehicles to pass on road surfaces of 18 and 20 feet, which still exist on many miles of our road

ways.

3. We all know that sharp curves constitute a definite hazard, especially those which come up unexpectedly.

4. The ability to see ahead also is of vital importance to the safety of operation. When vehicle operating speeds were averaging 35 miles an hour, design provided stopping-sight distances of 200 to 250 feet. To meet present and future requirements, stopping-sight distances of 475 to 600 feet are necessary. Sufficient sight distances for overtaking and passing vehicles has a direct bearing on safety of operation.

5. Shoulders should be of ample width to encourage drivers to stay in the traffic lane without fear of getting too close to roadside ditches or obstructions. Also they provide refuge for disabled vehicles.

6. The separation of traffic by center strips is obviously a deterrent to the most serious accident, that of head-one collisions.

7. Highway grade separations as well as railroad grade separations, when traffic volumes are large, eliminate the potential of collision at intersections.

8. Other important items of design include adequate lighting, proper channelization and skid-resistant surface.

Many recent studies show the value of controlled access as a means of eliminating accidents, providing maximum freedom of movement, improving property values and preserving costly investments.

All of these design features are part of the design policy adopted by the American Association of State Highway Officials, in cooperation with the United States Bureau of Public Roads. It is a policy based upon a considerable amount of research into the characteristics of traffic movements and driver behavior. Continuing research is needed to insure that in the future the design elements will further contribute to the safety of movement.

I have a few charts to illustrate specific results of research studies conducted by the State highway departments, the United States Bureau of Public Roads, and the National Safety Council. They are typical of accident studies made by these organizations.

CHART I-ACCIDENT RATES LOWER ON BETTER HIGHWAYS

This chart shows the results of a study conducted by the Connecticut State Highway Department over a 4-year period in which the accident rates on rural State highways meeting good design standards were compared with the rates on all rural State highways.

All other factors except the physical character of the road can be presumed to be the same-same drivers, same motor vehicles, same enforcement, and same signs and markings. The chart is of particular interest since it shows the total effect of good standards in reducing accidents as well as the variation in accident rates due to traffic volumes mentioned earlier.