Dave Murray: Far too many idiots among those who drive too fast

COMMENT

The succession of letters to the editor complaining about the role of the Land Transport Safety Authority and the police in promoting and enforcing speed limits has reached a crescendo in the Herald.

On Monday alone, one complained about enforcement on Auckland's Tamaki Drive, another thought there was an excessive level of enforcement on the Northwestern Motorway, and one suggested the authority interpreted statistics dishonestly.

My advice to these disgruntled correspondents is to get real.

They might do well to ponder what the accident levels might be on Tamaki Drive and the Northwestern Motorway if there were no enforcement.

In my days as a traffic engineer with the Auckland City Council, we kept a stock of Tamaki Drive-style street light poles to replace those knocked over regularly by motorists driving at what they considered safe speeds.

Indeed, it would be easy, when analysing accident report forms, to reach the erroneous conclusion that the most dangerous speed to drive is at, or just below, the signposted speed limit.

In the absence of independent witnesses, many drivers will not admit their true speed immediately before impact, a fact borne out by the ensuing levels of death, injury and vehicle damage that could not have occurred at the speeds stated.

In some cases, it is obvious they were going faster than they said. This can have the effect of skewing accident speed statistics below their true levels.

No one gets up in the morning and says, "I think I'll go and have an accident today", and they don't just "happen". They occur because someone makes what is often a combination of errors of judgment, one of which can be excessive speed.

A 600km return trip up north highlighted the risks imposed by drivers travelling at high speeds. Beware of boy racers and Remuera tractors being driven in broad daylight with their driving lights on full, looming up in your rear-vision mirror. This is not some European-inspired defensive driving practice.

These idiots are over-represented in the number who choose to exceed the speed limit while overtaking on blind bends or where there is insufficient space to complete the manoeuvre before meeting oncoming traffic.

They often get away with their cavalier attitude only because of the defensive driving of other motorists. Unfortunately, it is when other drivers are not able to compensate for their actions that accidents happen.

People who have not been involved in a serious accident, extracted injured occupants and dead bodies from wrecked vehicles or helped to clean up the mess and replace damaged street furniture afterwards generally have no concept of what that scene is really like.

Ask anyone who regularly deals with the often tragic results of excessive speed and its potentially lethal combination with alcohol and they will strongly support any efforts to curb excesses.

A simple tick in the "deaths" column of an accident report form can bring heartache to loved ones for the rest of their lives. And we must never overlook the far greater numbers who will suffer varying degrees of impairment for the rest of their days after being categorised in the "injuries" column. Many innocent folk and their families will carry a burden thrust upon them by someone exceeding the speed limit.

Some ask why the police don't exercise an arbitrary level of discretion above the 10km/h tolerance level at times of light traffic flow and in the small hours. Think about it. Would the same excess be tolerated by a cop on the Desert Rd at 2am as on the North-western Motorway by another?

Take that scenario to its full extent and you might as well abandon speed restrictions and simply rely on a "feel-good" factor, where everyone travels at their own preferred speed. Try that approach near primary schools at 3pm and see how the children fare.

Those disgruntled about the enforcement of speed limits need to ask themselves a question: are you really so important that all other road users should have to clear a path for you to save a second or two on your journey?

Hardly, you are simply one of the thousands getting from A to B in what could be a lot safer environment. It is the short-sighted "me first" attitude of an overly aggressive few that blights the safety of others.

Maybe by now you are exclaiming about a "grumpy old grey-haired traffic engineer from Flatbush". If so, I should add that my son-in-law is a motorway policeman, my brother is a funeral director and I live on the approach to a "safe" bend in a road from which I have extracted many night-time speedsters who thought they had it all under control.

Our combined experiences can have a somewhat sobering affect on one's attitude to speed.

* Dave Murray, of Flatbush, has been a traffic engineer for 35 years.