Grief on the roads

Slaughter on the roads and yet there seems to be indifference to it on the part of drivers and non-drivers alike

Slaughter on the roads and yet there seems to be indifference to it on the part of drivers and non-drivers alike. And, since Easter, every weekend has seen around a hundred deaths. This is France, and the newspaper Le Monde is shocked. It says in that only 15 per cent of drivers confess that they are uneasy getting in behind the steering wheel. The year's total deaths are around 8,000. Terrible. But taking account of France's population and huge road system, is it so much different to our own? We are about 3 million people and our annual figure of deaths on the roads is, say, 420; it has been as high as 472. They have 60 million people and 8,000 deaths.

The paper carries interviews with and photographs of a number of people. Ten of them take up two pages of the paper. A woman doctor and her husband are making for a holiday in southern Spain with their two small children. They decide to start at seven o'clock on a Sunday night and drive through the night when traffic should be light. At five o'clock in the morning the car was embedded in a roadside pylon. She was able to rescue one child. The other and her husband were engulfed in an inferno of flame. She doesn't remember who was driving.

A surgeon had a head-on collision at four in the morning. Three of the car's five occupants died. If you have children, he says, every time they go off, tell them how much they mean to you. A girl student confesses she lost control; she was a new driver, lacked certain reflexes. Her friend was in the back seat, but she had been thrown out of the car 10 metres behind. She had no feeling in her legs. She is photographed in a wheelchair. A father tells of his daughter being knocked down and squashed by a lorry driver who had his Walkman turned up to maximum. She would have been 25 tomorrow, he said. And so it goes on, drink and speed and the sorrow and the memories of those who were killed, one by a road-hog doing 150 kilometres an hour, with drink taken. The mother: "It was my only daughter, my only daughter, my only daughter. . ." This is the work of Raymond Depardon, who photographed and recorded the story of scores of victims and relatives of victims. Twenty-seven of these testimonies have been put out on television since the beginning of April. Portugal and Greece are top of the blacklist with France, the paper says. And what about the injured and the burned - and what about us here? The grief of the fathers, mothers and the rest of the family is often overlooked in a gale of statistics. That seems to be what Depardon has brought to the fore.