David Penberthy: There are zero excuses for our horror road toll
David Penberthy started writing about our appalling road toll on Wednesday. By the time he’d finished, it was out of date and another man was dead. This is tragic – but also maddening.
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This photograph tells you all that you need to know about the truth behind South Australia’s appalling road toll so far this year. As a result of this crash, there have now been 79 fatalities, up a staggering 30 from this last time year.
This picture merely documents what was the latest miserable addition to the grim list.
It depicts all that was left of a car that was being driven not in a manner appropriate for a suburban road but, rather, the racetrack at Le Mans.
The sole occupant was a 23-year-old man.
You need only glance at what remains of the 1993 Holden Statesman to work out that no one inside this vehicle was emerging alive from its twisted wreckage.
And while police are still investigating the circumstances, it is a banal understatement to say that speed was a factor in this crash.
Witness Terry Worrall was driving along St James Blvd on Tuesday when he saw the car speeding “in a flash” towards the western suburbs.
Mr Worrall said a white van was forced to swerve to avoid a head-on collision with the Holden that then ploughed through several trees.
He said the Holden then sideswiped a wall on a footpath before crashing into a tree on the opposite side of the road, a few footsteps from a bus stop.
“He was going miles too fast,” Mr Worrall said.
“Another five or 10 seconds and he would’ve hit me.”
It is, of course, sad that the driver lost his life in this crash. It is also stupid, reckless, wholly avoidable and totally selfish in that he could have also killed someone else.
But in killing himself, he has subjected his parents to a horror that no mother or father should have to endure – the grim task of burying their own child.
And the worst thing?
This sort of stuff happens all the time.
It has been happening almost once a week in South Australia this year.
Of these 79 road deaths, 14 involved circumstances where speed was a factor and a further 11 involved people who weren’t wearing seatbelts.
Not driving to the speed limit and not wearing seatbelts are 100 per cent avoidable forms of behaviour on the roads.
Yet they account for almost one-third of this year’s fatalities. When you throw in the number of drivers who died this year through inattention, be it checking their phone or sending a text, you have a situation where at least half of the fatalities were caused by things that we are told time and again never to do on the roads.
Police Commissioner Grant Stevens has said that there are no such things as accidents on our roads, that in almost every circumstance the prang could have been avoided if the drowsy driver pulled over and had a rest, or if the driver on an unfamiliar stretch of road had slowed down, or if they planned their trip so it wasn’t happening after dark.
As motorists, we all know there are times when the unforeseen happens and, if we are honest, there are times, too, when we become distracted by doing an absent-minded thing such as dropping a CD or turning around to look at our kids.
But in the most brazenly stupid category – speeding, not wearing seatbelts, constantly texting with your head down focused on the phone between your lap – there are zero excuses.
Humans have a blase capacity to absorb the most remarkably miserable facts and soldier on with no emotional response.
It’s become thus with the road toll.
Imagine if 79 people had died in bushfires or been devoured by sharks or blown up by terrorists this year. There would be saturation coverage.
We would discuss nothing else with our family and friends.
Road deaths have been so commonplace as to be mundane, and we all sort of shrug our shoulders as if to say, well, there you go, another one bites the dust.
A lot of this carnage strikes me as a male problem.
One of the best things my Dad ever said to me, when teaching me how to drive, was that a motor vehicle is not an extension of your masculinity.
For many blokes – indeed, for many dead blokes – the burnout, the controlled understeer on a country road, the dropping of the clutch at the lights and flooring it, all these stupid manoeuvres are seen as evidence that you’re a big guy in front of your mates or, most weirdly of all, regarded as a good way to impress the girls.
It is dictionary-definition dumbness. It makes you a loser. At worst, a loser of your own life.
As a grim footnote to all this, I started writing this column on Wednesday and it is already out of date.
Yesterday morning, we woke to learn that a 19-year-old man had died after his car hit a tree in the Riverland, exploding on impact.
Scratch the 79. As a result of that crash, 80 people are now dead.
And the latest death came on the same day that another bloke was caught doing 188km/h in Port Augusta.
The thing is, when you’ve got people driving around like that, you can bet your life (or theirs) on the fact that this column will be out of date again real soon.
We should stop beating about the bush on this stuff.
Yeah, it’s sad that so many people are dying.
But it is also maddening. Maddening because it is often completely avoidable.
Maddening because so many people have ended up with a death certificate that should rightly read: Cause of death – stupidity.