RESEARCHING THE ROADS
The perils of faster driving
My car is safer, so I can go faster.
Sound about right? Oh, maybe you’ve never actually phrased it just that way, but there’s no refuting the fact that those airbags and crumple zones are protecting an awful lot of drivers who would have been Darwin-ed off the planet just a few years ago. I don’t take automotive death and injury lightly, but I think a lot of drivers do. I also think that increased safety features don’t make for better drivers, just better cars.
The U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has just released a report stating carnage is up along with speed limits.
It attributes 33,000 additional deaths over the past two decades to the federal deregulation of limits.
Remember the advertising campaigns during the gas crisis when limits were dropped to 88.5 km/h?
As control was handed back to the individual states in the ensuing years, limits crept back up (or in the case of places like Texas, spring-boarded; it boasts the fastest highways in the country), and so, according to the IIHS, did fatalities. It figures that for 2013 alone, increased speed limits essentially wiped out the good that frontal airbags are doing.
Nearly two years ago, British Columbia upped its speed limit on 1,300 kilometres of highways to 120 km/h, making it the speed capital of Canada. There are sections of the country where the limit is 110 km/h, though Ontario remains at 100 km/h.
Critics want Canada to pay attention to what is going on south of the border; not only are its studies and stats more up to date than those of Transport Canada, but we’ve also historically followed many of the patterns of behaviour found there.
But wait. We keep reading that fatality rates are falling. So which is it? The IIHS report parsed out highway fatalities; overall rates of death and injury of drivers and occupants are falling, but as speed limits increase on major rural routes, fatalities that would be averted with increased safety measures are getting trumped by extreme speeds.
“Taking into account other factors that affected the fatality rate — including changes in unemployment, the number of potential young drivers (ages 16-24) and per capita alcohol consumption — (the study) found that each five-mph (eightkm/h) increase in the maximum speed limit resulted in a four per cent increase in fatalities. The increase on interstates and freeways, the roads most affected by state maximums, was eight per cent.”
British Columbia will be a highly watched experiment in Canada. Just weeks ago a provincial report noted vehicle crash fatalities had fallen by half between 1996 and 2013, but the increased speed limits went into effect in 2014.
I speed when I can get away with it. I speed when I have a great car; it’s amazing to drive a great car fast. I speed because when I was a tiny kid and my father got our bucket of a Rambler wagon wailing away at what felt like rocket speeds — it’s pretty hard to bury the needle in one of those — and it felt awesome (“go faster, Daddy, go faster!”). Humans like speed. Liking speed has nothing to do with the law.
The argument about speed predictably falls into two camps, both noisy: one right, one more righteous. If you hit something at a higher rate of speed, you do more damage. Ergo, speed kills.
That’s a truth. On the flip side, everybody speeds, many of our roadways have artificially low limits on them, and our cars are built to go faster. If everyone is going to do it anyway, why not raise the limits? Don’t let me forget that speeding tickets are a cash cow for governments. That’s an opinion.
The problem is when these two ideologies share the road. You don’t need a physics degree to understand that having vehicles moving at differing rates of speed is the most dangerous situation of all. Sure, that fool skipping in and out at 150 km/h is very obviously dangerous, but so is the turtle putzing along at 20 km/h under the speed limit.
The real danger is in the ratio, rather than the number.
Many people believe they are capable of handling higher speeds, and some can. The problem is, it has to be everyone, or no one.