WITH the arrival of summer vacation, people in north Germany take to the autobahns and head for recreation areas in the south. Last July 31 this resulted in Germany’s worst traffic jam in history. Traffic heading toward Munich stretched bumper to bumper for over a hundred miles! And just that one day fifty people were killed and 180 were seriously injured on Germany’s superhighways.

In 1970 over 19,000 persons died and half a million were injured on roads in Germany. The annual traffic death toll is nearing 20,000 in Japan, with another million injured! In France over 15,000 were killed in auto accidents in 1970. And in the same year, 55,200 died and over five million were injured in the United States​—170,000 of whom were crippled for life.

Thus each year well over 100,000 persons are killed and more than six and a half million are injured on the highways​—in just four countries!

Such figures are staggering, almost too great to conceive. They mean that, in these four countries, every five minutes someone is killed in a traffic accident, and about every five seconds someone is injured. The dead, if laid head to toe, would stretch about 115 miles! And the injured would reach some 7,000 miles​—over a quarter of the way around the earth!

Slaughter on the highways often far outstrips that on the battlefield. During World War II the United States suffered 291,557 battle deaths. But from 1965 to 1970 about 320,000 Americans died in traffic accidents​—nearly 30,000 more deaths on the highways than during the worst war in human history! Each year more Americans die on the country’s highways than have been killed in battle in ten years of fighting in Vietnam.

Although it may not be apparent, some success has been realized in making highway travel safer. In the United States the death toll would be nearly three times as high as it is now if the rate of fatalities per mile traveled were the same as in 1934. The number of traffic deaths actually dropped by more than a thousand in a recent year​—from 56,400 in 1969 to 55,200 in 1970.