WANKERS ON WHEELS

Now don’t get me wrong folks some of my best friends are wankers and some of my friends ride pushbikes but I am quite proud of the fact that I hate the wankers-on-bikes that seem to work for the Department of Stupidity and want to make car drivers and the economy suffer.

The Victorian Government is in the throes of examining why we still keep killing ourselves and others with our cars. Like the fact that it is not guns that kill people let us say from the get go that speed is not the culprit either but the wanker holding the wheel.

People who drive for a living all agree that speed is not the main culprit. Many of them want speeds to actually increase. When there were no speed limits outside towns and cities we only had about double the number of deaths we have now.

Uh!? What did I just say? Yes. We have halved the death toll in Victoria in the last fourty years. That is an achievement. But its an achievement reached almost exclusively by better designed vehicles, ABS brakes, air-bags and seat belts, baby capsules and head rests and a whole raft of other vehicle improvements. I don’t know the figures nor can we find them out accurately but it appears to me that a great many deaths occur when rat-bags are exceeding the speed limit, not by 5 or 15 k/ph but by 50 and 60Km an hour. When young people kill themselves hitting trees at 160Km an hour it is a tragedy, sure, but can we say the accident was senseless when the cast and crew in the vehicle were probably egging each other on the go even faster around the next bend and, quite possibly, under the influence of materials in the next story..

What does slowing cars down do? It adds to the economic cost of running motor vehicles. When a motor vehicles optimum performance is around 100 K/ph what is the cost of 40K/ph past schools? It is especially galling when the limit applies half an hour before and after school. If schools allow children out earlier or later than the approved times then they should be held responsible for the safety of the child crossing the street. For Christ’s sake what would it cost and how much would the economy save by just putting enclosed overhead pedestrian crossings on all streets around the boundary of a school?

Let us hope that someone less stupid than those looking into this problem come up with sensible and realistic answers than just the age old problem solver of slowing down the traffic.

Violet Crumble