Road Safety Is Priority

The start of the new year is yet another opportunity for us to #BeTheBetterGuy as we tackle overspeeding and delve into a few ways of resolving the issue by simply slowing things down

Speed. We’ve been fascinated with the concept of it and enthralled by its experience. It’s thrilling, it’s exhilarating, gets your pulse racing and as long as you don’t wake up from the dream, it’s a thing to be enjoyed. The reality of it though, is a lot different. Outside of the perfect world that exists in our minds, one where such thrills can be enjoyed without consequences, speed actually is a liability. Think about it; as much as speed brings excitement with it, it is short-lived. And it isn’t the easiest shot of adrenalin to achieve. Physicists and aerodynamicists spend years trying to cheat wind to make an object go faster, car manufacturers spend months in the wind tunnel to eke out another kilometre per hour and then there is the rest of us. Heading back from work on yet another Monday evening, looking for the right moment, that little window of opportunity to make that accelerator pedal kiss the floor, even for a few moments of playing with chance to satisfy that primal urge to go faster.

For those aerodynamicists, the safety of a lab negates the consequences of going faster, for the manufacturers, the safety of a closed test track subtracts the many variables of the real world but for the end user, aka you and I, speeding on public roads is only a speedy way of calling for trouble, all sorts of trouble. From endangering others to oneself to damaging public and private property to months spent in the workshop or worse still, in a hospital or behind bars. The consequences of misusing speed are many and critical. Statistical data collected over the years reveal the bigger picture of the repercussions. As much as three to five per cent of our country’s GDP is spent in deploying resources to rectify the damages from road accidents in totality and that’s a startling fact we wish we didn’t have to account for.