From the health point of view we are living in an amazing age. We are free from many of the most dangerous diseases. A large number of once deadly illnesses can now be cured by modern medicine. It is almost certain that one day medicines will be found for the most stubborn remaining diseases. The expectation of life has increased greatly. But though the possibility of living a long and happy life is greater than ever before, every day we witness the unbelievable killing of men, women and children on the roads. Man vs the motor-car. It is a never-ending battle which man is losing. Thousands of people over the world are killed or horribly killed each year and we are quietly sitting back and letting it happen.

It has been rightly said that when a man is sitting behind a steering wheel (方向盘), his car becomes the extension of his personality. There is no doubt that the motor-car often brings out a man’s very worst qualities. People who are normally quiet and pleasant may become unrecognizable when they are behind a steering-wheel. They say, they are ill-mannered and aggressive, willful as two-year-old and completely selfish. All their hidden angers and disappointments seem to be brought to the surface by the act of driving.

The surprising thing is that society smiles so gently on the motorist and seems to forgive his behavior. Everything is done for his convenience. Cities are allowed to become almost uninhabitable because of heavy traffic; towns are made ugly by huge car parks; the countryside is ruined by road networks; and the deaths become nothing more than a number every year, to be easily forgotten.

It is high time a world rule was created to reduce this senseless waste of human life. With regard to driving, the laws of some countries are unbelievably lax (不严格) and even the strictest are not strict enough. A rule which was universally accepted could only have an obviously beneficial effect on the accident rate. Here are a few examples of some of the things that might be done. The driving test should be standardized and made far more difficult than it is; all the drivers should be made to take a test every three years or so; the age at which young people are allowed to drive any vehicle should be raised to at least 21; all vehicles should be put through strict tests for safety each year. Even the smallest amount of alcohol in the blood can damage a person’s driving ability. Present drinking and driving laws (where they exist) should be made much stricter. Speed limits should be required on all roads. Governments should lay down safety specifications for car factories, as has been done in the USA. All advertising stressing power and performance should be banned. These measures may not sound good enough. But surely nothing should be considered as too severe if it results in reducing the number of deaths. After all, the world is for human beings, not motor-cars.

In the traffic lights,red means "stop",green means "go",and yellow means "hurry": Why those colors, though? Why not blue,purple,and brown?The following are transponded from others WeChat.

Red symbolizes danger in many cultures,which makes sense,considering it has the longest wavelength of any color,meaning you can see it from a greater distance than other colors.Red has meant "stop" since long before cars existed,with railway signals use of red dating bake to the days when mechanical arms lifted and lowered to indicate whether the rail ahead was clear.So that one's simple.

Green's role in lights has actually changed dramatically over time.Its wavelength is next to (and shorter than) yellow's,meaning it's still easier to see than any color other than red and yellow.Back in the early days of railway lights,green originally meant "caution",while the "all-clear" light was,well,clear or white.Trains,of,course,take an unlimitedly long time to stop,and legend has it that several disastrous collisions happened after an engineer mistook stars in the night horizon for an all-clear.Thus,green became "go",and for a long time,railways used only green and red to signal trains.

From the earliest days of motoring up until the mid-1900s,not all stop signs were red-many were yellow, because at night it was all but impossible to see a red stop sign in a poorly lit area.The yellow stop-sign craze began in Detroit in 1915,a city that five years later installed its first electric traffic signal,which happened to include the very first amber traffic light,at the corner of Michigan and Woodward Aves.

This month, Germany’s transport minister, Alexander Dobrindt, proposed the first set of rules for autonomous vehicles (自主驾驶车辆). They would define the driver’s role in such cars and govern how such cars perform in crashes where lives might be lost.

The proposal attempts to deal with what some call the “death valley” of autonomous vehicles: the grey area between semi-autonomous and fully driverless cars that could delay the driverless future.

Dobrindt wants three things: that a car always chooses property (财产) damage over personal injury; that it never distinguishes between humans based on age or race; and that if a human removes his or her hands from the driving wheel — to check email, say — the car’s maker is responsible if there is a crash.

“The change to the road traffic law will permit fully automatic driving,” says Dobrindt. It will put fully driverless cars on an equal legal footing to human drivers, he says.

Who is responsible for the operation of such vehicles is not clear among car makers, consumers and lawyers. “The liability(法律责任) issue is the biggest one of them all,” says Natasha Merat at the University of Leeds, UK.

An assumption behind UK insurance for driverless cars, introduces earlier this year, insists that a human “ be watchful and monitoring the road” at every moment.

But that is not what many people have in mind when thinking of driverless cars. “When you say ‘driverless cars’, people expect driverless cars.”Merat says. “You know — no driver.”

Because of the confusion, Merat thinks some car makers will wait until vehicles can be fully automated without operation.

Driverless cars may end up being a form of public transport rather than vehicles you own, says Ryan Calo at Stanford University, California. That is happening in the UK and Singapore, where government-provided driverless vehicles are being launched.

That would go down poorly in the US, however. “The idea that the government would take over driverless cars and treat them as a public good would get absolutely nowhere here,” says Calo.