What do you gain by speeding in a residential area?
The Sunday Nation
Nairobi,
03 January 2010
The sight of a speeding car in a residential area disturbs me greatly. It makes me wonder what the hurry is all about and how much time the driver hopes to gain. So, today I will try to work it out.
The distance from my house to the main gate of the estate is about 200m. Now if you drove this distance at 60km/h you’d cover it in about 12 seconds. Another driver going at sensible 30km/h will take double the time – 24 seconds.
But when you look at it differently, it is only 12s gained and, truthfully, there isn’t much you can do with that short duration of time. However, considering that there are many young children (most of the under five years of age) playing in the estate, the probability of having an accident at 60km/h is astronomically higher than at 30km/h (I will attempt to work it out in a future article).
So, by driving at 60km/h, you will be placing young lives at risk in order to gain only 12 lousy seconds! Shameful, isn’t it?
In reality however, the average family car accelerates from zero to 100km/h in just under 10 seconds. With that acceleration, the car reaches 60km/h in about 6s. In that time, it will have covered 50m along the road.
After accelerating, the driver cruises at 60km/h for, say, the next 100m and begins some hard breaking. At this speed, it takes another 6s to clear the 100m. The breaking from 60km/h to zero will take another 6s. This is a total of 18s to get from the house to the estate’s gate.
For the reasonable driver who doesn’t go above 30km/h, the acceleration will not be as high, perhaps, half that of the formula-one wannabe. Thus, she will take same 6s to get to 30km/h and ease off the accelerator. By this time, she will have covered 25m from the house. She then drives at 30km/h for, say, 150m and breaks gently over the remaining 25m.
Driving over 150m at 30km/h takes 18s; then she breaks for another 6s and stops at the gate. Her total time for the journey from the house to the gate is 30s – 12 seconds longer than the formula-one wannabe.
Now you might think that if you gain 12s in every 200m of the journey from the estate to the city centre from the house (about 7km in my case), you will accumulate a meaningful amount of time by the time to reach your destination, but this is not so. Once you are on the main road, you are at the mercy of the traffic jam! Everybody moves at the same speed.
And even if I did, it would be only 7min in my case and I can’t figure out what extra work I can achieve in that duration. Therefore, after all the numbers are in, the only significant thing you gain by speeding in a residential estate is the probability of killing another person most likely, a child.
Drive sensibly in the New Year.
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