We must stop blaming road accidents on speeding

By MUNGAI KIHANYA

The Sunday Nation

Nairobi, 30 April 2017

Inexplicably, all road accidents in Kenya are blamed on speeding. So, I was not surprised when I saw the following heading in the Nation on Wednesday this week: “Bus driver was speeding when he took 25 people to an early grave”.

Unfortunately, however, reading through the entire report, I discovered none of the witnesses, police officers, medical officers and rescue personnel interviewed ever uttered the word “speeding” or “speed”. That left me wondering where the writer got the notion that the driver was speeding. This was all in the writer’s mind!

Eleven years ago (January of 2006), I wrote in this column that it is near impossible to even vaguely estimate the speed of a vehicle by casual observation. The problem is that speed is a combination of two quantities – distance travelled and time taken.

While many people can estimate distance fairly well, time is nearly impossible. Most people miss it by over 50 per cent! Unless you devise a timing mechanism (for example, a careful count of heartbeats), you cannot distinguish 80km/h from 100km/h or even 300km/h!

If you doubt me, got to any airport and watch the aircraft approaching to land. They appear to be gliding along at a very gentle speed – perhaps, 50km/h – yet they are actually hurtling at hundreds of kilometres per hour.

Your estimation gets even worse when you are riding in the vehicle. You have to look outside to make any meaningful guess. But this accident occurred at night, thus it was impossible for any passenger to say anything about the bus’s speed.

The noise inside the vehicle is also hopelessly unreliable! Have you ever driven a car with a broken speedometer and tried to keep to the speed limit?

What might have helped, however, would have been a statement of the time the bus left Nairobi and the time it reached the accident point. Knowing the distance travelled and the time take, we could work out the average speed.

Then we would compare that with the average speed of other moderately driven vehicles and make a fairly good judgement on whether this bus was speeding or not. But even then, we still cannot tell how fast it was moving moments before the accident.

Unfortunately, such guessed conclusions about speeding are used in making road safety policies. Consequently, as fellow columnist Sunny Bindra says, “Kenya is the only country in the world where we erect a speed bump to reduce accidents and then remove it to reduce accidents!”

I think we will only begin to arrest our runaway accident rate when we stop blaming each and every one on speeding. We must look outside the “speed-box”. My guess is that we have too many poorly maintained vehicles driven by poorly trained drivers on poorly designed and poorly maintained roads.

Am I right? I don’t know. Only comprehensive investigations of accidents would give the answer. Meanwhile, let’s stop blaming it on speeding!