The fast and the injurious

Here’s one. What do you call an ambulance slowly pulling away from an Invercargill intersection crash? Chicken takeaways. Young people been playing games of chicken since time immemorial.

A screamingly stupid variant is, at least to some extent, resurgent in the south.

Cars are careering through Give Way and Stop intersections, russian roulette-style, their drivers presumably thinking themselves thrillingly wild and brave and either callously disregarding the lives of innocents, or failing even to give them a thought in the first place. They’re that vainglorious. The bitter irony is that the very signs we put up to alert ourselves to the need for particular caution have become, instead, attractants for some of the worst driving behaviour imaginable.

Southland District Mayor Gary Tong has stepped forward to draw wider attention to the resurgence of chickenbrained driving, and good on him for that.

Sure enough there’s been few social media splutterings that publicising such behaviour is irresponsible because it fans the problem, encouraging others to take it up.

It’s a dullardly argument. A shaky extension of the long, long list of things that the media is scolded would settle down and pretty much go away if only we would ignore them hard enough.

Shan’t. The mayor was not

. . . there’s been few social media splutterings that publicising such behaviour is irresponsible because it fans the problem, encouraging others to take it up.

misinformed as others have been quick to point out, some citing their own experiences.

As for the hoons, most of them learn in time that until the come to realise that these aren’t cheap thrills.

The true costs reveal themselves in familiar ways. Typically ugly ones in which the adrenalised show-offs, their lickspittle hangers-on, and all too often an assortment of luckless innocents are entangled in bloodstained carnage.

The hollaring becomes screaming. Which is followed, for surviving offenders, by anguished regret, feverish social reproach, aching lifelong guilt.

Which tends to put a few of their mates off.

But hoon culture has always been far more robust than the hoons themselves. It slow to learn and quick to forget until it’s hard-lessons time once again.

It’s nearly a decade since three young people died when a car slammed into a Leven St wall in Invercargill.

People were calling it a tragedy, which prompted the Southern District road policing manager at the time, Inspector Andrew Burns, to write an article asking that we all call it what it really was.

Some crashes, he said, were better described as travesties. He wasn’t wrong. Maybe we’ve found ourselves back in travesty territory again. In which case we cannot simply look to the police and expect them to be everywhere – and the very instant they’re needed.

A heads-up from the grownup public can achieve much. And a brush-up on our own defensive driving practices wouldn’t go amiss.

But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The chilling truth is there can be times when there’s just nothing an innocent driver could do.