There's a Tiger loose in the streets. The moan (of the engine) gets drowned out in its turn by a booming exhaust note that someone ought to bottle and seal as pure essence of car.
...While little can be said with confidence about "normal" aggressive behavior, it is fairly clear that there are persons who from time to time experience episodes of uncontrolled violence and that such persons are different from normal persons, much in the way that persons with alcoholism can be said to be different. Indeed there appears to be some overlap. The characteristics of persons who from time to time end up in situations where they "cannot control themselves" are only now beginning to be studied but there appears to be a repeated association between pathological intoxication, unrestrained physical attacks on other persons, sexual assault, and multiple automobile accidents. This has been termed the "dyscontrol syndrome." It may be that the popular conviction that automobile accidents are the fault of drivers arises from the perception of aggressive behavior on the part of others (and one's self) in situations where it is clearly intended. Dr. Thomas Allison has suggested that men are more likely than women to drive in this manner and, further, that "Often an habitual traffic violator is impulsive when under stress, and is irresponsible in all his living experiences."
It seems evident that drivers with periodically uncontrollable impulses to violence, like persons with alcoholism, cannot be much helped by advice to act differently. It appears that they cannot control what they do, possibly for reasons that are commonly conceived as psychological, and possibly also because of biological abnormalities as yet imperfectly understood....
When and if more is learned of this subject, it will be possible to apply such knowledge to the problem of traffic safety, and, further, to begin looking more closely at the still shrouded subject of homicide and suicide by motor vehicle.
THERE has been only the most cursory attention paid to what in truth may be the single most important secondary effect of the automobile, namely its impact on the American legal system. Even where the matter has been given attention, this has normally been directed only to the problem of the greatly increased number of personal injury cases which courts are required to process because of automobile accidents. However, at the present time, and given more or less recent developments in the behavioral sciences, two further questions must be asked.
1. Have the staggering delays in the judicial process brought about by accident litigation caused a deterioration in confidence in the legal system on the part of the American public?
2. In the present state of the law, is it possible to adjudicate automobile accidents in a manner that corresponds to the realities of the event, and if not, has this led to a further deterioration in confidence in the legal system?
It is not at this time possible to answer either of these questions. All that can be said for certain is that the courts are inundated with personal injury cases and that delays are growing--in one jurisdiction at least the judicial process for civil cases has come to a (temporary) halt.
The statistics are alarming in their proportion. There are some 13,600,000 accidents a year. Some 30 million citations for violations of the traffic laws are issued to residents of the United States each year. It now takes an average of 32.4 months to obtain a civil jury trial for a personal injury case in the metropolitan areas of the nation. In Suffolk County, New York, it is 50 months. In the Circuit Court of Cook County, serving Chicago, it is 64 months plus. The clerk of the Suffolk Superior Court in Massachusetts, where the present delay in such civil cases is almost four years, forecast in early December 1967 that it will soon increase to five years. In New York City, as of June 30, 1967, there were 26,397 civil trial cases, most involving personal injury suits according to the New York Times, awaiting action in the State Supreme Court. This led to intolerable delays in the processing of criminal trials as well. In December 1967, the Presiding Judge of the Appellate Division announced he was suspending civil trials in Bronx County for at least the month of January. In a forthcoming study Howard James reports that there is a current backlog in Texas of more than 212,000 civil cases.
At very least it must be said that the American judicial system is not working well. Some would argue that it is in fact breaking down. Automobiles are mostly to blame