Speed kills, or does it?

If speed alone kills, why don’t we all die every time we travel at a speed greater than our terminal velocity if we fell through the air? Why don’t formula one drivers die when travelling at over 200 mph? The simple fact is that it isn’t speed itself that kills. It’s the crash at the end of that movement when generally all our organs stop rather suddenly as our bodies hit more solid objects. It is actually speed used inappropriately that is the issue.

I live near Bristol, and it’s one of many places that’s now introduced 20mph speed limits all over the place, but seemingly rather at random.

One road I drove down recently changed from 40 to 30 to 20 and then a short stretch of 40 and finally back to 20. What is the sense in that if not to catch people out? Just make it all one limit for goodness sake. It’s not as if you get any more or less flow of traffic regardless. As a good friend noted, roads are like our circulatory system, with motorways being arteries, A-roads being veins, and rural and urban roads being capillaries. He actually came up with a good slogan too – “Don’t be a clot”, in other words, do your best to keep things flowing by not hogging the middle lane on motorways, letting other vehicles overtake if you choose not to overtake, or can’t keep up with the flow of traffic, and not parking in daft places on narrow roads.

We already have amazingly crowded roads in many towns and cities, but I am going to stick my neck out here and say that lowering speed limits is not, in my opinion, the way to deal with the problem.

For one thing, and I rattle on about this a lot, what research has been done on things like air quality in places gridlocked with slow-moving or stationary traffic? Obviously the move away from diesel cars and buses, and the rise of electric vehicles will help, but I would still like to understand the real effects.

My answer is, of course, driver education. People really need to understand that by sharing journeys, they can make a massive difference, not just to pollution levels, but to journey times, and the one that really gets me is the money saved. But, for this to work, insurance companies need to play ball too, and that’s unlikely to happen. It’s a huge subject and I’m trying to make simple points.

The road I use to Bristol from the M5 is 12 miles, and due to recent speed limit changes, there’s nowhere that is now national speed limit on the whole route. Before the changes, the average speed of my trip was usually about 35mph. Now it is 25mph and I can average 16mph on my bike.

So, although speed-related fatalities are obviously bad, I’d like to know how many people are dying from stress or heart attacks caused by having to drive at an average of 25mph, or dying from asthma or other respiratory problems caused by endless stationary traffic?

According to the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA, motor vehicles produce roughly one-half of pollutants like VOCs, (Volatile organic compounds) nitrogen oxide and particulate matter. Seventy-five percent of carbon monoxide emissions come from automobiles. In urban areas, harmful automotive emissions are responsible for anywhere between 50 and 90 percent of air pollution. All told, that’s quite a lot of air pollution coming from our vehicles.