Speed vs. Revenue

Speed 3 - The Final Insult

It’s very interesting that, just at the moment the South African government are proposing to reduce speed limits on the highways to reduce the road death levels, the UK government is debating whether to raise their motorway speed limits from 70mph to 80mph (117km/h to 133 km/h).

This just brings into sharp focus the utter stupidity of those in charge of our roads and the legislation that governs them. What baffles me is that they seem to be completely ignorant of the basic facts that even the most uninterested citizen acknowledges to be common sense.

Speed in itself does not kill. Speed in the wrong place kills. Atrocious levels of driving skill kills. Ignorance and arrogance on the roads kill. Corruption in testing stations and penny-pinching by private and commercial owners kills.

But to claim that lowering the highway speed limit by 20kmh will make any difference to the road death toll is pathetic. A bus or taxi full to the brim but with defective brakes or shock absorbers will have an appalling accident whether it is travelling at 120km/h or 80km/h. When there is that much metal and that much momentum, it is never going to be a mere bumper bashing. And it is these vehicles that are responsible for the greater proportion of road deaths.

 It is yet another example of the government side-stepping the issue of the condition of the majority of vehicles involved in the crashes in the first place. It is almost a case of; we can’t start pulling all the un-roadworthy vehicles off the road or imposing stringent and enforced levels of roadworthy-ness because half the vehicles on the roads would disappear and the larger proportion of the population will have no transport at all. So let’s rather lower the bar to their vehicle’s level and everything will be alright.

How many times have you been in traffic on a highway behind an old scrap heap of a car with, for example, absolutely no lights whatsoever – and I don’t mean just not working, but physically no light unit or ones that are absolutely smashed – or moving crab-like along the road whilst travelling forward and in the lane next to you is a police car with unrestricted view of the – patently – un-roadworthy vehicle. Does the policeman pull him over and with a look of disbelief tell him to walk home as his car is going to be towed to the scrap heap?

No, he ignores it and instead pulls over Mr Wealthy in his Range Rover. Before you accuse me of exaggeration, I actually saw this happen on the M1 near the Corlett Drive exit. I am not about to get into the whole dung heap argument of police bribery and corruption but I think the principle is the same; penalise the ones who can afford it and leave the rest of them to endanger lives.

The situation is almost becoming farcical; we will be told to travel slower on highways that our tax money paid for to be improved which we now have to pay to use! But still the risk of death will be there because the mobile death-traps will be all around us.

Talk about addressing the wrong issue. But what do we, the motorists, do? Nothing! We sit and take it and complain and take some more and still complain and continue to get shafted. Will we do anything about it? Not a chance. That would involve standing up to be counted and I’m afraid modern man is just too much of a wimp to do that.

So the powers that be will carry on and try to introduce legislation that will only serve to fill their coffers, none of which money will find its way back into the road system that generated it in the first place. One can only hope that sense will prevail, but given our beloved leaders priorities, I’m not so sure that will be possible.