“Hiyo gari ilikuwa inaenda kasi sana”! (that vehicle was moving very fast!) is a statement you very often hear every time there is an eye witness describing a road accident to a television news crew.
Having talked about ‘speeding’ trucks on Mombasa Road recently it got me thinking that speed is one of the most misunderstood concepts probably universally. Without going into the tedious descriptions of speed in physics that many of us have long forgotten, speed is a relative concept and it is always relative to something else. That means that where an object is stationery, then something moving past it is moving at speed. On the opposite end, two objects moving towards each other will have a closing speed of the combined speed of both of them (perhaps double speed would be an apt descriptor of such a scenario).
A tortoise plodding along would therefore consider a rabbit running past it to be moving very fast while a rabbit would consider a cheetah to be moving at great speed if the cheetah were to hypothetically be running in a race alongside the rabbit or even come to think of it the rabbit was running for its life from a cheetah out to make a meal of it! Similarly, a cyclist would be moving at speed when passing a walking pedestrian while a car would be at speed when passing a cyclist at top speed on his bicycle traveling along the same road. Ergo, a policeman waving down a truck that refuses to stop would consider the truck to be ‘speeding’ in relation to his relative position in regards to the truck!
However, this fascination with speed makes one think that all drivers in Kenya cause accidents by perennially speeding the concept of a speed limit not withstanding! Is it correct to state that an accident was caused by a ‘speeding’ vehicle (as would be reported by a watching bystander) which was travelling at 50 km/h while the maximum speed on that section of the road is 80 km/h? If the reaction by our overzealous police officers is anything to go by then they too believe that speed is the root cause of all road accidents and hence the recent crackdown on over speeding in various parts of the country.
They forget that decrepit and poorly serviced vehicles, poor road surfaces, careless pedestrians, slow moving trucks, foggy weather, tired drivers etc all contribute to the accidents on our road. If speed were the defining factor then those German autobahns with no speed limits would be a veritable disaster zone though access is restricted to motor vehicles with a top speed of more than 60 km/h meaning that many of our ‘speeding’ behemoth trucks would not be allowed on these roads.
Recent statistics sourced from Wikipedia indicates that the autobahn fatality rate in Germany is 1.7 deaths per billion-travel-kilometers and is much better when compared with the 5.1 rate on urban streets and 7.6 rate on rural roads in that country. On autobahns 22 people died per 1000 injury crashes; a lower rate than the 29 deaths per 1,000 injury accidents on conventional rural roads. I am sure these numbers are much higher in our speed deprived nation of Kenya.
So don’t believe any eye witness reports that an accident was caused by an over speeding vehicle in the absence of facts to back this up and to the detriment of other contributing factors. Similarly don’t believe any policeman who says that speed is the main cause of accidents on our roads because the well-built autobahns in Germany would be veritable killing fields if this were the case.
My take is that if the governement were to build us better roads, get those ‘speeding’ trucks of those roads and then leave us free to get to our destinations as fast as possible they would see the accident rate plummet!!
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