Paul Thomas: Speed kills, and we're all too prepared to accept it

COMMENT

"Hypocrisy," wrote John Milton, "is the only evil that walks invisible, except to God alone."

When Paradise Lost appeared in 1667, Milton had been blind for 15 years, which probably shaped his perception of what was and wasn't apparent to the naked eye. It's hard to imagine even the sight-deprived expressing such a sentiment today.

In this age of spin, hard sell and pre-programmed "have a nice day" insincerity, hypocrisy oils the wheels.

Take speeding. Last week the police revealed their intention to dish out 25 per cent more speeding tickets next year.

Anticipating renewed accusations that the Government was using the police as unofficial tax collectors, Police Minister George Hawkins burst into print. Last year, we were told, speeding was a factor in 167 deaths and 623 serious injuries, and the estimated social cost of speeding-related crashes was about $890 million.

The previous day, the same newspaper (not, I hasten to add, this one) had a double-page spread on European cars. All four stories - couched, of course, in the tractor-manual prose of the automobile industry PR hand-out - laboured the point that these machines were un-bloody-believably fast.

For instance, we learned the Peugeot 307 XSi could go from zero to 100km/h in 9.8 seconds and its top speed was more than double the open-road limit.

Compared with the Porsche Carrera S, however, the 307 is the automotive equivalent of a tortoise recovering from a double hip-replacement operation. The Carrera S gets to 100km/h in 4.8 seconds and has a top speed of 293km/h.

The article helpfully added that if that wasn't fast enough for you, the Porsche 911 Turbo S could do 307km/h.

Now I like a flash ride as much as the next consumer but it strikes me there's something fundamentally absurd (if not actually insane) going on here. If we're serious about reducing road accidents caused by speeding, why on earth are we importing cars that can go three times the maximum speed limit?

We've all been told that the risk of death to pedestrians increases dramatically the faster a car is travelling. I'd add that a driver hell-bent on finding out whether his new toy really can get to 100km/h in 4.8 seconds could take out a kindergarten class on a pedestrian crossing and be in the next suburb before he realised what he'd done.

No doubt the motor industry, paraphrasing firearms manufacturers, would assert that cars don't kill people, drivers do. The poet Milton would have an answer for this intellectually and morally bankrupt mantra, which is that ever since humanity fell from grace in the Garden of Eden, we've had the devil's own job resisting temptation.

The truth is that we're serious about the road toll - up to a point. We accept a certain level of carnage as the unavoidable, accidents-will-happen price we pay for being able to get from A to B a lot quicker than we could on foot or horseback.

And we can live with some extra, avoidable carnage - much of it caused by speeding - because it suits us.

Us being the designers, the manufacturers, the oil companies, the unions, the car dealers, people who like to keep up with the Joneses, people who like to get one up on the Joneses, people with more money than sense, and assorted speed freaks who go quietly bananas when they climb into their customised bucket seats, pull on their driving gloves and turn the key to bring their mighty mechanical steeds to thunderous life.

And politicians.

And so the whole hypocritical show goes on. In the space of half an hour (or even, conceivably, the same three-minute ad break), we can watch a Land Transport Safety Authority infomercial in which a physics professor demonstrates that an extra 5km/h can be the difference between a minor ding and a serious crash, and a car advert featuring arty footage of the latest souped-up dream machine howling down the highway.

Why has the male model at the wheel got that crazed, pre-orgasmic look on his face? Because it's exhilarating to give our wimpish speed limit the proverbial two fingers? Because he knows that if he loses control at that speed, they'll have to wash him off the tarseal with a high-pressure hose?

Or because he's being paid to convey the impression there's nothing quite like the thrill of driving un-bloody-believably fast?