Campaigns

If you were driving to your death, would you still speed?

In today’s busy world, we’re always in a hurry. Things to do, places to go. But if you knew you were driving to your death, would you still speed?

Between 2015-2019, 1912 people were killed or seriously injured on 110kmh roads. Around 24% of crashes resulting in death or serious injuries on rural roads are caused by excessive or inappropriate speeds to the conditions. It’s easy to think there’s not much harm in pushing the speed limit. But did you know the crash risk increases exponentially the faster you go? For example, in a 60kmh zone, you’re twice as likely to have a serious crash by travelling 5kmh over the speed limit. Travelling at 70kmh increases the chance of crashing by 4 times and travelling at 80kmh increases this chance by 32 times. Vehicle travel speeds affect both the risk of crash involvement and the severity of injury. Research into the capacity of the human body to absorb crash energy has found less than 10% of pedestrians would die when struck by a vehicle travelling at 30kmh. Compare this with fatality rates of 26 per cent at 40kmh and over 80 per cent at 50kmh. Regardless of the posted speed limit, the risk of serious injury or fatality is greatly increased in the event of a head-on collision at speeds over 70kmh, and 50kmh in a side-impact collision. Slowing down gives drivers more time to react to emergencies and greatly reduces the distance required to stop. And if a collision cannot be avoided, the risk of serious injury or fatality is greatly reduced. It’s easy to let the speed creep up when we’re in a hurry, thinking we’ll save some time and get to our destination faster. But increasing speed doesn’t save as much time as many people think. Let’s think about a 100km trip. If we travelled at 20kmh, it would take 5 hours to get to our destination…are we there yet? At 40kmh, we’d get there in half the time. But at higher speeds, the benefit of pushing the limits gets less and less. The difference between 110kmh and 120kmh is less than 5 minutes over a 100km trip. It’s just not worth it. Slow down.