KEN'S KORNER - OCTOBER 2004
SPEED KILLS
By Author, Educator and Big City Driver Ken Skaggs

Growing up in the sixties and seventies, I must have heard a thousand times that speed kills. Of course, they were talking about drugs. Apparently, shooting-up speed was popular back then, with the junkies of those days. These days, I think heroin, crack and methamphetamine have replaced speed as the drugs of choice. But I am not here to talk about drugs. I just wanted to revive an old-saying, simply because it fits my interpretation of one of the biggest problems out on the road today - the fact that speed kills. Of course, I am talking about driving (or living, for that matter) too fast.

Some of you might not be old enough to remember this, but back in the eighties, there was a maximum speed limit of fifty-five mph imposed on the entire country. I think they repealed it around 1992, but the dates aren’t as important as the facts. One of the selling points on this fifty-five mph speed limit law was the fact that at that speed, if you have an accident, chances are you’ll live. Whereas having a wreck going sixty or more mph, chances are you’ll die. Since then, cars and trucks have gotten safer, so that dividing line may be higher now, I’d guess about sixty-five mph.

But, something strange happened when they passed that (55 mph) law - fatalities increased. Since they repealed it, many states raised their speed limits back to their old limits, or even higher. As predicted, fatalities went down again. Not because it was safer to go faster, but because traffic flowed more evenly. I think it was because during that time, when fifty-five was the maximum, many drivers (like Sammy Hagar) simply couldn’t drive fifty-five. There was chaos on the roads, with law-abiding citizens going fifty-five and others doing whatever speed they thought they could get away with. Many drivers still did the old speed limit, or ten to fifteen mph over that, like they always used to. The end result was that everybody chose to travel at a different rate of speed, which made for very unsafe roads. One of the first things they taught us in Drivers-Ed was that the safest speed was to go with the flow of traffic (of course many states still have different speed limits for trucks than cars - go figure).

However, when I say that speed kills, I am not only referring to the miles-per-hour of your vehicle. It’s the whole mindset - that you can shave off seconds here and there, which adds up to minutes, maybe even an hour, over the course of a day that causes drivers to wreck. For example, if you travel at a speed of ten mph over the speed limit for six hours (6x10=60), you could conceivably save an hour. Of course, when you get a ticket you have to deduct that time from your equation (plus the time it took you to earn the money it costs), but that’s another story. This mindset, that seconds count, leads to all sorts of other bad habits, like tailgating, rolling stops at stop-signs, lane-dodging, trying to never turn the cruise-control off and, of course, speeding. In general, I am referring to drivers who are always in a hurry.

My theory is that almost every accident is caused by someone who was in a hurry at the time. Sometimes people simply make a mistake and that can cause an accident, but more often than not, when you look at the circumstances of an accident, usually the one at fault did something stupid because he or she was in a hurry. I applied this theory to almost every accident that I either witnessed or heard of and it almost always holds true. Someone runs a stop sign - boom! Someone can’t stop in time because they were tailgating or going too fast for conditions - boom! Someone switched lanes too quickly - boom! Someone speeds up to make it through a yellow light - boom! It’s almost always the result of someone being in a hurry and trying to save those precious seconds.

In trucking, there are even more mistakes a driver in a hurry can make, like giving in to dispatch pressure to be on time, no matter what. Or, let’s say you pick up an overweight load and you don’t think you have time to bring it back to the shipper, but somehow you still find the time to get a ticket. Or, you find something wrong with your truck (maybe you have a blown tail light) which doesn’t seem like a big deal and you can fix it when you get to your destination, but along the way you get pulled-over and waste even more time (and money) getting another ticket. Sometimes things that seem to waste your time could actually be worse. It’s always better to waste an hour at a shipper or an hour at a repair shop than it is to waste an hour getting a ticket or being put out-of-service, or worse yet, having an accident.

Some drivers get caught in the cruise-control daze, as I like to call it. They want to leave it on all the time to make sure they get that high mph average. But with all the traffic on the roads today, sometimes you just have to turn it off, whether you like it or not. Sometimes they get so comfortable with the cruise on, they simply won’t turn it off. They’ll let themselves tailgate for a few seconds, waiting for a chance to switch lanes, then weave around slower vehicles at the last second.

Driving can be an emotional experience for many people. They need to “feel” like they are getting somewhere. Never mind math or safety, they just have to drive the way they always have. After all, old habits are hard to break. Too many drivers think that once they pass that test, they are done learning. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The fact is, we are all still learning, no matter how long we’ve been driving. Please be careful out there. It’s not a video game - you don’t get another quarter to try again if you fail.