Hey, Phil, I caught this Oscar-nominated documentary on TCM, Traffic with the Devil, made about 11 years after the crash Ray witnessed, showing folks had learned no better by then (nor have they now). Here is the best-quality copy I could find, but feel free to look for a better one. (On TV it looked and sounded much better.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Uorwb6M-9A

This gave me many Ray Bradbury and Jack Webb flashbacks. The officer narrating even looks and sounds somewhat like Webb, and this program is fascinating for those who enjoyed Webb's shows, to see how things were done 25 years earlier--no wonder so many died in the field before the paramedic program!

WARNING: THIS FILM CONTAINS REAL FOOTAGE OF DEAD AND INJURED TRAFFIC ACCIDENT VICTIMS OF ALL AGES! FACES NOT BLURRED!

From the Bradbury standpoint, the newspaper reports and footage of officers writing down statistics on a chalkboard and keeping track of accidents with pins in a map are fascinating. Presumably they have one map of the city per year and the pins are color coded per month, that is if pins can be found in twelve colors! Then maps could be flipped and compared year to year.

The film crew, of course, was along only for the documentary, and not as a regular thing, but one would think there'd be crime scene photos at least. Will have to look into what may have been preserved. I heard a sad story that New York had so many, they took tons of fascinating vintage photographs of historic crimes and dumped the lot in the East River!

UPDATE: Source found, inquiry sent, copy sent to you.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: dandelion,

Additionally, Traffic With the Devil relates not only to accident references in Ray's work but directly to his story "The Trolley." A true instance in history of a dastardly plot was the General Motors Streetcar conspiracy which took place between 1938 and 1950, when streetcars, which were clean, efficient, and which people loved, were replaced with cramped, smelly old buses.

By the time a Los Angeles resident realized this was happening not only in L. A. but all over the country and exposed it, the streetcars were scrapped, the war was over, and most everybody could afford a car and so bought one which was the automobile, tire, and oil manufacturers' plot all along. The very year after the war came Traffic With the Devil about increased vehicle accidents. Of course, people like Ray who had either financial or physical impairments preventing driving were out of luck. Ray spent years trying to establish public transportation in the L. A. area and as far as I know there still is none any more than there is a guard rail in the Paris tunnel in which Princess Diana was killed.