One thing I noticed when I was in Britain is that the drivers there are considerate, patient and law abiding. However, drivers in South Africa are rather inconsiderate, impatient and disregard the law.
One thing I noticed when I was in Britain is that the drivers there are considerate, patient and law abiding. However, drivers in South Africa are rather inconsiderate, impatient and disregard the law.
Although there is a lot more traffi c and congestion in Britain, there will always be someone who will stop or slow down to let you into a lane, and pedestrians have priority.
The principle of “do unto others” is generally followed on the roads there. Motorcars sure are very dangerous pieces of equipment.
Many people are unaware of the power in their hands and oblivious to Newton’s scientifi c laws of motion in their hurry to get somewhere.
For example, a car travelling at 80km/h (once braking starts) takes 52.7milliseconds to come to a complete stop.
At 100km/h, the stopping distance increases to 77.7m and at 120 km/h it takes the same car 107.5m to stop. This speed to distance ratio grows exponentially the faster you go.
This invites a review of Newton’s fi rst law of motion, that objects in motion tend to remain in motion and resist stopping, so the faster an object travels, the more it resists stopping.
These computations are based on dry roads, however on wet roads there is much less friction and the stopping distances grow exponentially, which makes the combination of speed and wet roads lethal.
I used to regard these statistics as primarily for other people until I experienced the full extent of Newton’s fi rst law on a wet road in Scotland in 2005.
You just skid and nothing will stop you except another vehicle, a tree, ditch or a barrier in my case.It is a terrible feeling to be completely out of control and it’s not worth any amount of time saved by hurrying or speeding.
South Africa has one of the highest traffi c accident fatality rates in the world, costing the country around R16-billion per year.
Presently 14 560 people are killed each year (40 per day) and about 620 000 crashes occur each year. A person is killed every 48 minutes in South Africa according to drivealive.org.za.
In the UK, on the other hand, between 3 200 and 3 500 people are killed by vehicle accidents each year, with only 247 780 recorded crashes in 2008.
These statistics become even more ludicrous when we take the population of the UK and South Africa into account: there are around 61.4 million people in the UK as opposed to about 48.5 million people in South Africa and 9 533 444 million vehicles in South Africa (at the end of 2009) as opposed to almost 33 million vehicles in the UK.
So the UK has over three times as many vehicles on its congested roads and has less than a quarter as many fatal crashes as we do.
The speed and recklessness with which we drive on our relatively uncongested and open roads is what kills us.
We live in a semi-Wild West culture where going over the speed limit or overtaking on a blind rise is considered as normal.
I believe South Africa would do very well to adopt the speed limits and strict laws of other countries, and when we do, we will see our accident rate decreasing exponentially.
Geoffrey Embling is a Maths teacher at Mary Waters High School
