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This is an abstract of papers presented at the First National Congress for Traffic Safety by R. A. Paredes, A. R. Esparza, I. S. Macedo, and N. Trevino.
It was agreed that the driver's psychological motives—the need to compensate for feelings of inferiority, guilt feelings projected onto the other driver, projection of 'ego boundaries' onto the car, etc.—were largely responsible for traffic accidents. The car of the Mexican male driver has become for him a symbol of his peculiar 'maleness' (machismo), a 'maleness' in the interests of which it is necessary to break laws with impunity.
The pedestrian concomitantly is respected neither by driver nor policeman, and has been forced to adapt himself to traffic hazards with consummate skill as a life-saving measure. However, since neither the young nor the aged are able to 'dance' through traffic with a reasonable life expectancy, remedial measures were strongly recommended. These would take the form of mental hygiene clinics established expressly for the purpose of screening drivers-to-be—both physically and psychologically—to eliminate all those whose personality traits make them 'too great a risk to be trusted behind a wheel'.