Motor drivers get safer as they grow olde except for a slight lapse in middle age, is the finding of a couple of experts in London who have been making a study of accident proneness amongst motor drivers. They form the opinion that the rise in the accident rate in middle age was due to the fact that advancing age may come almost imperceptibly upon people, so that they continue to take the same risks as they did in earlier years. When they become definitely old they realize that this can no longer be done, and so take fewer chances. The compilers of the report which has just been issued summarize their conclusions as follow:
Those who fail in certain psychological tests have a higher average accident rate than those who pass, and those who had an undue number of accidents in their initial period of exposure tend io have a higher subsequent accident rate than others.
Experience, although it lessens accident rate does affect differences between those who are specially prone and others. The former always have a higher accident rate than the others, It almost seems to follow from the above that the only safe drivers are those well on in years, and who have never shown a proneness to accident, for clearly if a young man has shown himself as something of a accident fan even the passing of years fails to bring about any amendment of his behaviour. If the experts who are responsible for this report had had. the opportunity of going into the matter of accidents in Shanghai they would probably have come to the conclusion, that judging from the accidents and their frequency, some of Shanghai's drivers must either be suffering from perennial youth or have been caught in some middle age from which there is no escape. But even that is unlikely to cause the Municipal Council to pass a regulation insisting that no driver of a motor car in Shanghai shall be less than the tender age of sixty er thereabouts.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.