Thursday, Jul 02, 2009 at 10:10
D200Dug,
While I understand and can appreciate the sentiment, the reality is that by setting speed limits where they are and by choosing to invest what we do in road
infrastructure, we, as a society, have already made a decision that we are prepared to kill off a certain number of our members each year.
I always find road speed discussions interesting because there IS a way to reduce the road toll to (virtually) zero. If the national speed limit was set at 5 km/h and was able to be enforced (which it could) then we would stop the road toll (barring freak accidents of course).
But, and it is a big but, the cost to society in terms of convenience, money, time is too great so we raise the national limit to say 50 km/h and in doing so accept a number of deaths each year. Still too slow for a country of such big distances I hear you say? OK we make the limit 100 km/h and in doing so accept that we are going to kill off more of our number each year.
What I find interesting is when our authorities (
Police and Government) and our own society says that those who make the decision to go over the speed limit and cause death are bad, we forget that we have already made the decision to kill people with our speed limits.
So who gets to say what are an acceptable number of deaths and what are not? Why is it OK to travel at 100 km/h and kill 1600 people a year, when we could all go at 110 km/h and 'only' kill 100 more each year? Maybe if we travelled at 80 km/h we would only kill 1400 each year.
The trade-off is of course what we, as a society, are prepared to accept in terms of convenience and speed of getting from one point to another while going about our business.
When horseless carriages were first introduced, many countries required that in cities they be preceded with a bell to warn other road users and pedestrians. This was because the road
infrastructure, level of experience of other road users and awareness of pedestrians (not to mention horses), was not up to the challenges imposed by this new technology. You could argue that the motor vehicle and society's expectations of its use, has again moved on beyond the point where society and
infrastructure can cope with it. A bell is impractical, but perhaps (as happened early last century) it is time to once again seriously review the
infrastructure (roads) and the training and awareness of those who use them.
Matt.
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