Slow down - or drive safely

Despite what the authorities are trying to brainwash drivers into believing the two are not synonymous. So I’m going to sound like a stuck record yet again on the subject of holiday driving. But so is everyone else when talking about road deaths and speed limits during holiday periods, so why should I be any different?

These depressing thoughts struck me yet again as the Christmas / New Year period ended and the road toll continued to be virtually unchanged – up in some areas, much the same in others, thankfully down in a few places.

As usual the holiday period began with politicians who have little or no knowledge of driving spouting off about road safety and quoting misleading numbers about the percentage of crashes caused by exceeding speed limits.

Then the police issued dire warnings about being everywhere and promised we would all get caught for speeding sooner rather than later.

TV stations jumped on the bandwagon by running ghastly car-crash commercials. Their news departments then kept a running score on the tens of thousands of people booked for exceeding speed limits, and another gruesome list on the number of road deaths. It never seemed to cross their minds that the concentration on the former wasn’t affecting the latter.

From time to time an earnest looking police person would feature on the TV news with a story of a lunatic driver caught doing something like 123 km/h in a 60 km/h zone. The inference being that we would all drive at such ridiculous speeds but for the vigilance of the police force. Which is arrant nonsense – only a tiny minority of drivers are idiots and these bogans will continue to do the wrong thing no matter how many speed fines they ignore and how often they keep on driving without a licence.

This enormous concentration on speed enforcement isn’t working. I’ve said it many times before, but will continue to do so; the vast majority of drivers will travel at the correct speed for the circumstances and shouldn’t be fined, perhaps even lose their licences, for technical breaches of limits.

Those who do drive at an excessive speed for the conditions should be dealt with very harshly, preferably in some way that will keep them off our roads until they finally wake up to their own stupidity.

Varied results come from road-safety research worldwide, but the general conclusion is that excessive speed is responsible for between three and eight per cent of road crashes. So why do driving-slowly campaigns occupy something like 90 per cent of the holiday-period road-safety messages?

It really is time the authorities weaned themselves away from the enormous revenues being generated from minor speeding fines and started to get serious about campaigns addressing the real causes of road crashes.

They could start with the number one killer – inattention. This is the primary cause of about seven times as many fatal road crashes as excessive speed. OK, I admit it’s not as easy to design an inattention camera as it is a speed camera, so the authorities would have to work out how to spot inattention. That’s not difficult, talk to any experienced driver and they will say they can spot an inattentive one from a long way off. The number one cause being, of course, mobile phones.

A series of ads stressing the importance of paying attention while driving wouldn't be hard to put together and could have immediate positive results. And the “law-is-the-law-and-must-be-obeyed” brigade should think again. Anyone who feels blind obedience to the road rules is guaranteed to keep them out of trouble is living in fantasy land.

Driving is an extraordinarily complex task that requires constant monitoring of a multitude of factors and taking the correct actions moment by moment. Which brings me to the next track on my stuck record – always have two hands on the steering wheel, two eyes on the road and all of your attention on driving.
 

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