The Goldmine Sound - bite
I have no idea when the cliché ‘Speed Kills’ was first delivered to our society in a bid to make drivers slow down but I do know that it has become the accepted driving law which governs all of our thinking about driving, road safety and road use. It is also a very revenue based message because, dealing with speeding drivers is now automated, cheap to prosecute, so is very lucrative.
Of course these cameras will earn even more revenue for their operators if there are more speed limits to go with them.
Let's also understand that the cameras themselves, at £40,000 a piece, are not being supplied for altruistic or philanthropic reasons either and that no-one involved with them is doing it freely or without considerable vested interest.
I believe that many of our speed limits are entirely political, if they are not installed after a history of accidents on their stretches of road to support their installation, so therefore can only be there to increase revenue for the service. If this is so, then it is a very dangerous practice because drivers are now spending more time concentrating on their speedometers than on the road where they should be.
By compressing the progressive driver to less and less unrestricted road, certainly whilst ignoring the slow drivers who will not give way to other drivers too, actually contributes to accidents and the death toll. So lets examine the cliché on which all this is based.
It is no coincidence that the faster we have become so the expectancy of life has gone up not down. This is because speed is motion and motion is speed. Without it there would be no commerce, no aid flights, no budget holidays, no space exploration, no trains, invalid carriages, no walking and no emergency vehicles. In fact our world and society would collapse without speed; it is an important life-enhancing element. Not only has speed enhanced life but it has contributed to it's longevity.
The word speed does not mean or even imply fast, and it certainly does not kill on it’s own. Even in road terms, it is a fact that although having an effect on the outcome of every accident, it is the primary cause of only one unique class of road accident where all the remainder have their own primary cause.
How can we present ourselves as being concerned about saving life on our roads and yet fail to address the primary causes of road accidents? Surely it must be better to prevent accidents before they happen than simply worry about their outcome; the only aspect consistently affected by speed?
So In my view the cliché 'Speed Kills' is too simplistic, dangerous and silly for it to be applied to what is a very serious and complex subject and is, as I have shown, a demonstrable myth.
Speed and motion are both inextricably linked. If there were no speed your heart would stop beating and you die. So the sound-bite is false.
'No speed kills!' is the real truth.
Before we can even begin to make any honest progress in road safety, such an emotive and inaccurate cliché should be abandoned.
Keith Peat
