Transportation

Are the dangers associated with modern travel greater than those in the pre-motor-car age? Before 1920, motor-cars were quite rare. Horses, oxen, elephants, mules, donkeys and even dogs and camels furnished most of the pulling power.

I know most about horses. I have seen them pulling trams, racing along with fire-engines, dragging ploughs on farms, straining to move heavy lorries, especially beer-trucks, or prancing along with fancy traps and carts.

My father owned a horse and wagon. On Monday morning, after its Sunday rest, that horse, which my father called "Money-maker" really felt its oats. He was eager to get going, to run full speed. Naturally, he was in a dangerous mood and could easily have run into people in the city. During the snow and ice of winter he skidded along on his iron hooves and was doubly dangerous to his driver and to pedestrians and to little children using their sleds to glide over the snow and ice.

These youngsters, seeing a wagon passing by, would try to hitch their sleds to the tail-gate of the wagon and so get a free fast ride, reckless of the danger of being thrown off or being run over by some other horse or wagon.

In summer, when they were roller-skating in the street they tried to catch up to and hold on to any passing wagon. That was fun until the skates caught into a pot-hole or on a sewer cover and made the skater lose his grip and fall flat on his face and break his nose. I broke my nose by trying such a stunt. But such methods of going places are only memories.

Today, most people travel by motor-car, bus, tram, train, ship and plane. Plane travel is safer than train transportation and may be the safest of all forms of travel unless you are around North Korea or Israel. Since many more people travel on planes than on trains or ships, a plane crash does not kill so many people, relatively speaking, as a train accident or a ship-sinking.

May be trams are safer than trains or even ships. But buses seem to be more dangerous than most other vehicles, especially mini-buses. Certainly, private motor-cars seem to be the most dangerous of all. They say that ninety precent of the night road accidents in the United States are caused by drunken drivers in private cars.

More Americans are killed in road accidents every year than were killed in any year of either the Korean or the Vietnam War.

Walking is also a means of travelling, although not in the usual sense of the word. Yet, many pedestrians are killed by vehicles - especially in the city, wher people walk across streets anywhere they please and where motor-car drivers feel they own the streets and drive right into crowds of walking people, expecting them to give way and disperse.

- Fr. J.A. Daleiden
- Orson L. Jarret