The sky-high price of speed

Police figures show that motorists have started driving faster just about everywhere in recent years. And this obsession with speed is killing us, our children and the people we love. And all this misery and grief apparently leaves us cold. We resign ourselves to it happening. It is bad luck that happens to us. But is that so, or are speed and its attendant casualties more than coincidence?

And then it happens again, several times a day in Belgium: a life is crushed or scarred forever, and we hear the familiar words about heartfelt sympathy and that it was a terrible accident that should never have happened ... Well, these are not accidents, but results. Of years of neglect, of years of procrastination to make our traffic safer, of design choices tailored to machines instead of people, of lax enforcement, of lobbying against speed limiting technology in cars. Of years of unconditional flow and free lane for the automobile. Nay, these are not accidents, but the direct result of a broken system that mostly ignores the most vulnerable road users.

It seems an almost impossible question. A huge mountain of work remains to be done, but only by starting it will it be reduced. Whether the experiment with the'bike chit' that speeders will soon receive with their fine works remains to be seen. Occasionally, some cities take concrete steps to bring down road speed. Leuven, for instance, is extending the 30 zone to all its boroughs by the end of 2021. This means that cars, mopeds and cyclists will now be allowed to drive no faster than 30 km/h on most streets in Kessel-Lo, Wilsele, Wijgmaal and Heverlee, in addition to Leuven centre. But despite all the small steps in the right direction, the key question remains: what are all those cars actually doing in our residential areas, in our school environments and town centres? The bottom line is that we need to work on reducing motorised traffic and need many more car-free residential and school streets. So that we first start reducing in numbers before we start reducing speeds. Or maybe a combination of both will have a reinforcing effect? In any case, plenty of research exists. Now is the time to choose humans over machines in real life too. Only then will we get change with long-term impact.

Whatever the price tag, it is high time for change on our streets. Too many families have had to experience how inhumanly high the price is if we don't choose real change. However, the call for change is loud enough. Now it is up to you, policymakers, traffic experts, engineers, planners and other -logists and specialists. The safety of our children, your children and everyone we love depends 100% on your decisions. Plan inertia urgently back into our traffic. Plan and build to suit people and not machines that suppress our humanity. In the meantime, we continue to work from the bottom up, and with more and more like-minded pacesetters, to build healthy streets, neighbourhoods, cities on a human scale.