This [the Audi Procon Ten system] is the cutting edge of safety in cars, and it comes on top of anti-lock brakes, rigid safety cells, traction control and any number of other devices to keep you alive, should everything turn pear-shaped.
And therein lies the problem. Very soon, people are going to realise that they can have huge crashes, at any speed they choose, and walk away.
They'll be careering into buildings, pedestrians, lamp-posts and people in older, less-well-protected cars knowing that they are immune from injury. This won't do.
So if car manufacturers are really interested in promoting safety on the roads, rather than introducing new measures about which their marketing departments can crow, they should ditch all the new ideas.
Rip out the air bags, and in their place, fit titanium spikes which, in the event of a crash, will leap out of the centre of the steering wheel and impale the driver on his seat.
- Jeremy Clarkson (presenter of TV's Top Gear program), writing about 1994 - found in Clarkson on Cars. Unfortunately in the following article he wrote:
I therefore propose a minimum 130 mph [220 kph!] speed limit on motorways [how many trucks can go that fast?] which will scare away the truly hopeless drivers and force those who could be good if they tried to concentrate.

If motorcycles were a new invention proposed today to road authorities, it's unlikely they would be approved.
- Letter from Michael Griffiths (Chair, National Panel on the Biomechanics of Impact Injury, Engineers Australia) to Engineers Australia magazine, May 2006.

It has always seemed to be tempting fate to have motorists speeding towards each other at up to 100 km/hr [I think he means 200 km/hr] separated only by a line painted on the road. The margin for error is just too small, and the consequences too horrific, to take the risk.
- Michael Secomb, writing in the Coffs Harbour Advocate (15/11/02) about the Pacific Highway Upgrade Program.

Safe driving requires a highly developed sense of co-operation and a complete subjugation of the competitive urge. Why should we be surprised when people who live in a culture that deifies competition regard the road as a competitive environment? After all, we've taught them from the beginning to regard virtually every environment as competitive - from the classroom to the swimming pool.
- Hugh Mackay, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (20/1/01)

The 16- to 24-year-old age cohort is the only American population group whose life-expectancy is less than it was in 1904 because traffic deaths and gun-shot wounds hit that age-group with the greatest intensity.
- Stanley Hart & Alvin Spivak, in The Elephant in the Bedroom

"But you've got to be sober to fly ... I mean, it's not like driving a car."
- Homer Simpson, advising the permanently sloshed Barney against taking helicopter lessons

"DONOR CYCLES : term for motorcycles, because accident victims make good organ donors."
From a list of authentic US medical slang published in the book Behind the Scenes of ER.
- Sydney Morning Herald (26/5/00)

Drivers involved in accidents have a greater tendency than other motorists to describe themselves as better than average drivers.
- Daily Telegraph (3/10/89)

We have to look on road safety in the same way as we look upon safety in our working environment, in air transport or in rail transport. In those fields every fatality or serious injury is regarded as a failure which should not happen again.
- Gunnar Carlsson, in "Vision Zero" in Perspective of Global Generalisation

The most scandalous effect of pollution by motorised individual transport is the killing and maiming of people on a warlike scale ... Presumably it will remain a puzzle to later generations how a society could come to terms with a technology which demands human sacrifice in such vast numbers.
- Otto Ulrich, in The Greening of Urban Transport

It is quite possible that young children are totally unaware of many of the judgements that need to be made in the crossing of a road ... It was discovered that the child had believed that by crossing his fingers before he crossed a busy road he would be protected from all danger. The child had been observed to follow the standard procedure of viewing traffic prior to entering the carriageway. However on further questioning it became apparent that this was a ritual for him which was performed without any relevance to traffic safety.
- Sandels, Children in Traffic

To be safe, to feel safe at all times, to have no serious anxiety that husbands, wives or children will be involved in a traffic accident, are surely pre-requisites for civilised life.
- Colin Buchanan, Traffic in Towns

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