Online Reporter
WITH 100 people dying on the roads between the start of the festive season in the week before Christmas and Boxing Day, it is sad that many people are simply not listening to the excellent safety advice they are getting from traffic safety experts and the police.
Most worrying is the rise in the number of accidents in those 12 days, basically doubling from the 1 211 in 2024 to 2 412 this festive season.
Of those accidents, 87 produced at least one fatality, often a pedestrian, with multiple deaths in many vehicle collisions.
In 2024 there were 77 fatal accidents in the same period.
These latest police statistics cover roughly just the first half of the festive season. We have yet to get the statistics for the rest of the long Christmas weekend, the figures for this week, what might happen during the long New Year’s weekend, and then the likely carnage as so many people crowd the roads to return home at the end of the festive season.
While police patrols have been intensified, and police have been equipped with breathalysers and speed cameras, most of the fatal accidents were not the sort of thing police can continuously monitor.
Head-on collisions were numerous, along with tired drivers veering off the road and smashing into trees and rocks.
Then we have pedestrians walking along road edges clutching their phones and listening to music with headphones. Many pedestrians seem totally unaware of how difficult they are to see at night.
Many drivers do not understand just how deadly a head-on collision can be, or even smashing a tree at such speeds.
The experience gained with seeing low velocity urban collisions or the sort of accident that occurs on many farm and rural roads is totally useless.
At combined speeds of 10km/h at an intersection, or even 20km/h or 30km/h, the damage is usually just a bit of work for a panel beater and the worst injuries are little more than bad bruising.
It needs someone on a major arterial road to turn in the face of oncoming traffic before we start counting severe injuries and deaths, although pedestrians who think they are immortal while walking on the wrong side of the road in dark clothes add to the numbers killed.
But at highway speeds, a head-on collision is inherently fatal. Almost all of us had pounded into us in the earlier years of high school that the energy of moving objects is equal to the half the mass times the square of the velocity, and we need to apply at least the concept.
The mass of a vehicle is not really a big deal, double the mass and you double the energy in a collision, but on the other hand there is more resistance to damage in a crash, so perhaps it evens out.
But double the velocity and you have four times as much energy, triple the velocity there is nine times as much, quadruple the velocity as you move from fast urban speeds in intersections to highway speeds and there is 16 times as much energy. So speed is what causes the fatal forces.
Two vehicles colliding head-on at 120km/h on the highway release four times as much energy as each would release if the drivers drove into a solid wall or a big tree, and few would fancy their chances of survival, if they did that.
If you do the calculations, you find that two one tonne vehicles, not all that large since pick-ups are in that category, each travelling at 120km/h will release something close to 4,5 million joules in the single second of a crash.
The safety measures many car makers now incorporate, such as collapsible bodies, air bags and the like, are effective at low speeds but totally overwhelmed at high speed.
At highway speeds you get the ripped metal of the vehicles and mangled bodies of the dead regardless of what the construction entails.
This unsafe overtaking, or lane encroachment, is one driver becoming impatient, feeling a four hour trip should be done in half or three quarters the time.
So they take risks and they die, and the passengers in their car, often their family, die and even more horrifically the people in the other car die, even if that driver follows every rule in the Highway Code.
All of us on the road, and especially the highways, need to think about this.
We need to realise that when we break the rules, we do not just kill ourselves, but we kill others and do we want to die a killer.
One hopeful sign that cultures can change is the police noting that no public service vehicles were involved in the accidents and the statistics.
We might sigh when we come across a bus or heavy truck cruising along at its set maximum speed, and slowing us down perhaps. But those drivers have been tamed.
Operators of these heavy vehicles have been made responsible, forced to put in the real-time satellite tracking and make sure the drivers follow the rules set out in the Highway Code and the law.
It has worked.
These vehicles might be hit, but they no longer smash their way through traffic. We all need to take their example seriously, as proof that following the rules can keep us all alive.
