Traffic - Speed IS a Problem
“Didn’t you mean to give me a warning?” the young lady asked our motorcycle officer recently, as he presented her with her citation for speeding and asked her to sign her name. He wanted to tell her “Sure. Here’s your warning: If you speed again, I’ll give you another ticket” but he resisted the temptation.
Many times officers are asked if they don’t have something better to do with their time rather than stopping people for going a few miles over the speed limit. After all, don’t we all speed just a little? There are assaults and thefts, burglaries and robberies happening that have not been solved yet. Wouldn’t our time be better spent focusing our efforts elsewhere? To these people we simply smile, knowing that they will never understand why we do what we do.
Many do not understand the speed problem and how it relates to the cause of many of our crashes. And they are our crashes. These “accidents” are not really accidents that we have no control over, but crashes that happened because of something that we did or didn’t do. They are our problem and can be corrected just by altering our driving behavior. Speed sets up many of these crashes.
Many times the person who pulled out in front of another car tells the officer issuing a citation for failing to yield that the other car was speeding. The officer could ask “why would you pull out in front of a speeding car?” The problem seems to be that the person who pulled out thought they had the time and space to do so safely but didn’t realize that the other car was speeding. I believe that the reason lies in our perception.
When we travel the freeway at 65 mph, we look far down the road. Our vision is long and narrow. When we travel in a residential area on the other hand, our vision is comparatively shallow and wide. We see a car coming from down the block and our brain makes several decisions in the fraction of a second. Our brain tells us that this is a residential 25 mph area and that the oncoming vehicle is out of the area of concern for this locale. We make the decision to turn or pull out, without giving a second glance for the speed of the oncoming vehicle to register in our minds. If we gave a second glance, the distance would have changed and we would be able to tell the speed of the oncoming vehicle and make the better decision to wait until it passed.
At 25 mph, there is a perception distance and reaction distance and the distance it takes to skid to a stop. Based on 3/4 of a second for perceiving and 3/4 of a second to decide what to do, the perception/reaction distance is about 55 feet. The skidding distance is about 28 feet, which means that a vehicle going 25 will see and be able to stop within about 83 feet. Add another 10 miles an hour to this, which seems to be a normal, acceptable amount to speed, and the total stopping distance becomes 132 feet! If a child comes out into the street to chase the ball a hundred feet in front of someone going 10 over the speed limit, they will stop 32 feet after striking the child. Yet if an officer stops that person for speeding just 10 over the speed limit, the officer will catch all sorts of grief for having his or her priorities out of whack. In a 40 mph zone, the difference between 40 and 50 mph goes from 160 to over 220 feet to stop!
Many crashes would never happen if people could rely on others going the speed limit. They would be able to pull out or turn in front of oncoming vehicles with comparative safety. Officers give citations for speeding because they have seen what going too fast can do. We are here to make the streets safer for you and for us and for the little girl who runs out after her ball.
Written by
Sgt. Craig Harding
Public Information Officer |
