Forty… fifty… sixty… seventy… Oh, darn there is a 50 kilometre per hour speed limit road sign ahead! My right foot applies pressure down on the break pedal and the next 500 meters of straight downhill is spent quietly plotting against the retarded planner who decided that that particular speed limit was justified. Further up the road one comes across another example of road engineering genius as I do my best to ignore the brightly neon back-illuminated adverts that line the dark road, obscuring the precise location of the concrete wall beside it. Experience and a little bit of luck pulls me through yet again and off I head to another ridiculously slow speed limit.

It never ceases to amaze me just how poor the planning abilities of the road planners can be, nor does it comfort me to know unboisterously that I could do a lot better. On the other hand I have to acknowledge that they have long faced the unenviable task of attempting to cater for a highly disproportionate vehicle ownership density, again thanks to opportunistic mismanagement, which has done nothing to make their task any less complicated.

This is obviously a country where money not only talks but walks, where hypocrisy exists even upon the level of standard road safety. How can a governing party not hide its face in shame when its apparent solution to deteriorating road qualities is similarly deteriorating speed limits? How can such a government land heavily upon drivers unfortunate enough to be caught 5 kilometres an hour over the speed limit upon a stretch of road insultingly graded as safe up to 50 kilometres or less an hour? How can such a government apparently ignore the risks that back-illuminated signs can pose to on-coming drivers at night, drawing their attention off of the road, and then have the cheek to lecture us about the dangers of using a mobile phone while driving? How exactly is this not hypocrisy?

Oh and just to clarify, no I have not as of yet been caught “speeding”. I am a relatively mindful driver and one of the things that I am mindful about is fuel efficiency, not one of the best bed partners of true speed. I have, however, directed the mysterious powers of my admittedly feeble ill-will towards the speed cameras, willing the fuse to blow or for the device to otherwise malfunction. Thus-far results have only proven that my ill-will is indeed feeble, but I still try.

Perhaps if I were to hear that they were being coupled with more safety-orientated rather than profit-orientated speed limits, and perhaps if they were to ‘not’ be contracted via private firms, and perhaps if I were to learn that the monies generated were actually going towards improving the roads rather than private interests, then I might redirect my feeble powers of negativity towards another worthy adversary – perhaps the rust forming on my car’s bonnet or maybe some of the more poorly-designed speed bumps, more than able to rattle one’s suspension at under half the supposed speed limit.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under On Local Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.