The State Highway Patrolman
By B. B. Meek, Director, State Department of Public Works.[1]
THE purpose of highways is to serve travel.
This being so, the safety, the convenience and the comfort of traffic must ever be uppermost in the minds of highway builders. The highway must be planned to make its use safe. It must be designed to make travel economical. And with these factors of safety and economy, there must always be included the additional factors of comfort and enjoyment in highway use.
But with all the care, the thought and the money road engineers and road builders can put into the highway, their entire effort will fail, if travel using the road is careless and reckless in such use.
The careless motorist can make the safest highway dangerous. In a moment’s time a reckless motorist can undo all the months of effort and time and can bring to naught the millions of dollars that have been expended in the attempt to make our highways safe.
Proper regulation and control of traffic are accordingly as essential to a GOOD highway system as are proper plans for its building and the use of proper materials in its construction.
Engineers and builders are the men behind the line in the battle for good roads. Maintenance forces and traffic officers are the men on the firing line. The maintenance engineers must see that roads once built are maintained in adequate condition for travel. Traffic officers must see that travel uses these roads properly.
This latter task is by no means a small one. I had occasion recently to summarize the job somewhat as follows:
California law permits a driver of an automobile to travel, under favorable conditions, at a rate of 58⅔ feet a second. The automobile manufacturers and distributors have seen to it that a large portion of the machines on the highway are capable of traveling easily at the rate of 75 or even 90 feet a second. The hand and eye and mind of man can be coordinated by education to a marvelous degree but a 3000-pound automobile, traveling at a lawful speed of nearly 60 feet a second, or 40 miles an hour, is a force to be reckoned with at any time.
Multiply this by the hundreds of thousands of cars traveling our highways, each operating on its own schedule, coming and going, backing into and crossing traffic, as desire or necessity may dictate, and you have something of the picture of the problem that confronts the men who build and maintain highways, and those who seek to control their operation.
THE TRAFFIC OFFICER A “COP” NO LONGER
The successful traffic officer accordingly must possess a rare combination of qualities.
He must be patient, even where impatience would seemingly be justified; he must be courteous, even to those who may not be courteous to him. He must be kindly without sacrifice of firmness. He must be both a teacher and an officer, his attitude instructive toward those who desire to be instructed, and his control courteous but immediate and certain, toward those who refuse instruction.
The problem of controlling traffic, however, is by no means, unsolvable. An assisting force in the fight for better highways is the fact that an overwhelming majority of motorists desire to be careful and to do the right and fair thing by fellow motorists. The problem these drivers present is to bring to them a realization of the great, everpresent and immediate danger that lurks behind the least act in careless driving. The traffic officer becomes here a professor in the College of Safe Driving, the students of which extend over the world and are literally numbered by the millions.
Unfortunately there is a very small minority of motorists who either are congenitally reckless or who for some reason known only to themselves refuse to be careful. This class of drivers must be controlled with both firmness and sternness. Every moment that they are on the road, they constitute a menace to the life of other travelers. In this class belongs the drunken driver. Toward these drivers the attitude of the traffic officer must be that of a policeman, exercising his duties without fear and without favor.
The successful traffic officer accordingly must possess a rare combination of qualities.
He must be patient, even where impatience would seemingly be justified; he must be courteous, even to those who may not be
- ↑ Reprinted from the 1929 convention yearbook of the State Highway Patrolmen.
