Word: smashups
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...provide enough water, build enough hospitals to accommodate its mushrooming population. The city can barely build new freeways fast enough to keep up with the growing auto population, and traffic is already so bad that a single accident can pile up as many as 50 cars in one grand smashup. The task of problem solving is falling increasingly on the state government in Sacramento or on Washington. After city and county authorities balked at using local tax funds, for example, the state put up $3,900,000 for seed money for a new rapid-transit system still in the planning...
...statistics of malignant motoring are hard to face. One American is killed in traffic every eleven minutes. More than one-quarter of all U.S. autos are at some time involved in an injury-producing smashup. Since the auto was invented, it has killed 1,500,000 Americans, more than the toll in all the nation's wars. The number of fatalities has jumped 29% since 1961. Though the death rate has been cut by two-thirds since the 1930s, to 5.6 per 100 million vehicle miles last year, car travel is still substantially more dangerous than commercial plane travel...
...bridges over a particularly congested three-mile stretch, transmit pictures of cars to a 14-screen big-brother console near by. Technicians at the console can zoom in their lenses for closeup shots of any single suspicious vehicle; on several occasions they have watched on television while a smashup or a breakdown occurs. Then they call a policeman and throw switches that change speed-limit signs, block ramps, and turn on big red X signs over the lane that is blocked...
Three days after the smashup, Paradise's operating license was suspended. Later, when the outfit's license expired, the Federal Aviation Agency refused to renew it. At the time of the crash, Paradise Airlines was a two-year-old, scheduled, intrastate California carrier, flying leased planes between Oakland, San Jose and Lake Tahoe. It also had permission to operate charter flights to and from the Tahoe area. The doomed plane, Flight 901A, was a combination chartered and regularly scheduled flight...
...that the three judges had heard, a departmental panel considered some facts about Martinis' driving record. He was arrested for speeding three times in 16 days in 1959, lost his driver's license, got it back two months later by lying about past convictions. After the parkway smashup, police found ten unanswered traffic tickets in the glove compartment of his car (five for driving with a defective muffler, five for parking violations). In late July, the department announced its findings: 1) Martinis was speeding on the evening of the accident; 2) he was zigzagging through traffic...