[crisis]

I will continue my rant. This weekend there was a two page spread in the paper outlining how we should (again) reduce our speed to reduce the seriousness of injuries. The editorial went on about how reducing speed by a small amount (at the moment there is this “wipe off 5 (km)” thing going on) and you will reduce the seriousness of accidents. It then supported(?!) this by outlining the increase in seriousness of injuries when a car is travelling at 30 -40, 40-50, 50-60 and so on with the fastest 90-100 speed showing serious injuries. Up until around the 60 kph mark the injuries appear to be generally non life threatening.
I have no problem in people driving slower really but the message here is that it is all about speed. They are asking people to reduce their speed by 5kmh when any speed up to 60kmh seems to result in non life threatening injuries. So reducing to 55 or as the new speed limits are 50 has a marginal effect (although admittedly each case will be different). Moreover reducing from 100kmh to 95km also appears to make little different as 90-100 results in largely the same injuries.
What they should also be enforcing is attentiveness and driving at a speed appropriate to the road conditions. What they should be doing is upgrading our major country roads into dual lane carriage ways and finally making defensive driver training compulsory.

That’s me again for a while,