Ghoulish Guess

Traditional to any U.S. holiday is a national urge to gas up the family car and take to the road--and a National Safety Council compulsion to predict the number of travelers who will never get home. The ghoulish guess on highway carnage resounds on TV and radio, runs in routine lament through endless headlines and holiday editorials. Observing tradition, the Safety Council predicted that 450 corpses would litter U.S. highways during the four-day July 4 weekend. By July 5, the estimate proved conservative: 509 car riders had been killed, and "a new record" set. Lamented Safety Council Vice President George C. Stewart last week: "One of the most tragic weekends in our history."

But even as the tragedy was inscribed in Safety Council record books, there was increasing protest against the holiday custom. For one thing, the statistics were deceiving. It was true enough that 509 men, women and children had died on the road (491 were killed to"set the old record on the same weekend in 1950), but in post-mortem estimates, the Council could only make wild guesses at how many Americans were driving on the fatal holiday. Though the U.S. boasts 25 million more cars than it did in 1950, no one could be sure what part of the mobile population decided to celebrate the Fourth of July by taking a trip. Fact is, despite the alarming record, the annual death rate per hundred million vehicle-miles has fallen consistently since World War II, dipped to 5.3 in 1960 v. 11.5 in 1943.

Aware of such statistical problems, the National Safety Council concluded six years ago that its estimates had outlived their usefulness and decided to abandon them. But, complains N.S.C. Statistics Division Director Gene Miller, the wire services balked. "They said that if the Council didn't do it, they would find somebody else, or do it themselves. So we might as well do it and do as competent a job as possible." In that spirit, the corpse counters last week closed their books on July 4 and looked ahead to Labor Day.

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