NEW YORK.—The Transport Workers Union of America, AFL-CIO representing some 25,000 maintenance employes of the Pennsylvania Railroad, is asking the public to help in its request to the president of the railroad to wipe out a racial discriminatory practice.

The union is asking an end to the practice of marking "colored" on employes' railroad passes as a means of identification. The employes are entitled to these passes by law and company regulation, but they are often not issued to. Negroes unless they agree to having them stamped with the word "colored".

This is a discriminatory practice which does not seem necessary for a great railroad to insist on and it probably has been allowed without railroad officials giving it much thought.

I hope that a great many people will urge the president of the Pennsylvenia Railroad to remove this identification from all of its passes issued to colored employes and their families.

People all over the country are becoming more and more concerned with the number of traffic accidents.

I received a letter the other day suggesting that those who drive cars be asked to hand in their suggestions of how dangers could be eliminated. This is done in many businesses, and the government employes are said to have submitted 300,000 suggestions for improvement in the work they do. Eighty thousand of these suggestions were actually used.

So my correspondent lists some problems of the driving public.

He writes:

"The public is not informed enough about the cause of accidents; secondly, the public should be alerted to the dangers of certain types of roads, in Nevada for instance, where accidents occur frequently in long stretches of desert driving when the drivers doze at the wheel." This is true, I am sure, of Arizona and Mexico.

My correspondent mentions the dangers of the levee roads of California. And many of us have seen how difficult it is for people unaccustomed to mountain driving to drive in mountainous areas.

My correspondent suggests that a date be set, say 1960, as a goal for changing our appalling accident statistics on the road and that state and national officials bend every effort to finding and acquainting the public with the cause of accidents so that they may more clearly be kept in mind and suggestions made for their prevention.

There is nothing we can do with people who insist on driving faster than is safe. Nor is there anything we can do with those who are so anxious to reach their destination two minutes earlier that they run tremendous risks by weaving in and out of traffic.

The average person, however, just doesn't think, and I believe that many accidents come about through thoughtlessness alone.