Jim Kenzie's Latest Street Racing Article ...
06-06-2008, 08:20 PM
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Jim Kenzie's Latest Street Racing Article ...
I saw this over on the Rennlist ... Looks like Jim has been reading some of my threads on this subject! 
Read posting #19 in this thread ... http://forums.corvetteforum.com/show....php?t=1744650
Next time I see Jim, I'll have to have a Chat with him about giving credit where credit is due!
Jim Kenzie
Special to the Star
Jun 07, 2008
Albert Einstein is believed to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.
By that definition, our enforcement policy of speed limits on our highways is totally insane.
The 100 km/h limit was instituted after Canada switched to the metric system in the 1970s. It actually represented a drop in the limit, which formerly had been 70 miles per hour, or 112.5 km/h.
Thirty-five years of enforcement have resulted in – what? Cars going 120-to-130 km/h, all day, every day. Jeez, if speed limit enforcement worked, don't you think we'd all be driving 100 km/h by now?
Those same highways have by far our lowest fatality rates. Am I missing something here?
Apparently I am, judging by some of the reaction to my street racer column a couple of weeks ago.
First, understand that the Star's letters to the editor policy states that every reasonable viewpoint will be expressed. The number of letters printed does not in any way reflect the volume received on any given viewpoint. My editor says I get the letters and emails that support me, while he gets the angry ones. I did get a few of those too, but I can tell you that my mail is running 10-to-one on my side.
Second, complainants: read the column again. Where do I ever advocate street racing?
Of course I don't.
I was using a bit of humour – street racing in a Volkswagen Jetta Station Wagon Diesel Automatic! Street racing in a Smart car! That's funny stuff, kids – to illustrate the idiocy of Ontario Highway Traffic Act section 172, which equates fairly normal and certainly common commuting speeds with street racing.
Among other things, this denigrates the fight against real street racing. Where's the outrage over the irresponsibility of that?
Never mind that turning a police officer into judge, jury and executioner appears, as one lawyer correspondent pointed out, to be blatantly unconstitutional. Whatever happened to your day in court?
(I heard earlier this week that the first Charter of Rights court challenge to this statute was to be filed this past Thursday. Can't wait for that one.)
We build highways capable of speeds in the 120 to 130 km/h range. We build cars that are capable of these speeds, and more. As another correspondent noted, we have had 35 years of technological development since the 100 km/h limit was introduced.
Personally, I put universal fitment of radial tires near the top of that list. But we also have stronger, more crash-proof structures, and smarter seatbelt systems, which, along with legislation and enforcement, have led to vastly higher belt use rates than we had back then.
Directional stability control systems, which really do prevent crashes, are starting to work their way down into the mainstream. Airbags, ABS and other technologies don't have as big a statistical impact; you should pardon the expression, but are also nearly universal. There is no doubt our cars are safer than they were.
We give licences to people which, considerable evidence perhaps to the contrary, indicates at least to the recipients that they are capable of driving at these speeds.
And guess what? For the most part, they are. Millions of individual trips are completed every day in this country, at these speeds, in complete safety.
To those who say we should drive slower to save fuel, you're welcome to do so, as long as you stay in the right lane. Well, you should stay there anyway, unless you're passing someone.
But should someone who drives a Smart car be allowed to drive 130 km/h, while a big SUV be restricted to 100?
Let the price of fuel be the determinant. You can choose a fuel-efficient car. You can choose to drive at whatever speed you're comfortable with, up to the (hopefully new) limit. You can choose to do both. You can choose to do neither, and face the consequences.
That's what it means to have a free market in a free country.
So, why can't there be an efficiency dividend for the progress we've made in the past 35 years?
As I say over and over, speed isn't the problem; speed is the objective. If we weren't in a hurry, we'd never build highways, we'd go slower – and we'd be less safe.
Canada has seen traffic fatalities drop, not only in absolute numbers – from more than 5,000 annually 35 years ago to about 2,700 now – but even more impressively, on a relative basis, compared to the number of kilometres we drive. That's huge progress.
I understand that every casualty, whether a death or serious injury, represents a deep tragedy for the victims, and their families and friends.
I know this personally. Before I was even born, my 5-year-old sister was run over by a truck, right in front of our house. The ramifications for our family continue to this day, 65 years and three generations later.
And I have never been able to imagine how tough it must have been for the truck driver, although he was not in any way at fault.
This incident informs everything I have ever written on traffic safety. I want all of us – the car companies, car consumers, drivers, the police, the courts, the politicians, the highway designers – to focus on things that will work, or at least might have a chance of working, not on political grandstanding ploys or PR campaigns.
Thirty-five years of trying to enforce an artificially low speed limit surely has proven that it has no chance. Albert Einstein was right. King Canute was wrong.
Ontario justifiably brags about having the safest highways in North America. And no doubt we should never stop trying to get better.
So, what should we do? Well, we could look at other jurisdictions, to see what they do.
Many countries in Europe have speed limits of 130 km/h (France, Spain and Germany, except in the latter case where on some stretches of autobahn there are no limits at all). Many more have limits of 120 km/h.
Europeans generally drive cars that are smaller and less crash resistant than ours. This also contributes to the fact that they get vastly better fuel consumption than we do.
European freeways are generally not as well engineered as our better highways either. Yet despite all this, they have similar if not better fatality rates than we do.
A system that is more environmentally friendly, faster, more efficient and just as safe? I'm having a lot of trouble seeing any downside here. Isn't it at least worth a look?
So, what do they do that is so different?
Regular readers will have heard all this before. But the one thing that really stands out when driving in Europe – much more than the higher allowed speed – is lane discipline. They drive right, pass left.
Part of this is highway design: the driving lane (the right lane for most; the left lane in England) almost never disappears. People can be confident that they can sit there doing whatever speed they choose, and neither get run off the road by a transport truck, nor have the lane disappear by magically turning into an off-ramp.
This would take a week and a few hundred litres of lane-marking paint to fix here, but I can't get Canadian highway designers or the provincial Ministry of Transportation to even recognize it as an issue.
Part of it is education. Are Europeans inherently better drivers than we are? I must have missed that lesson in school.
No doubt Europe has tougher driver licensing regulations than we do, and if the powers that be here really wanted to make things better, they'd be pushing for that, and not more photo radar cameras in Mississauga.
Next, we should do what traffic engineers have always advocated: set a speed limit that reflects the 85th percentile, the speed below which a total of 85 per cent of the traffic is doing, assuming good road conditions.
The point here is that all evidence suggests it is not the absolute speed that's the problem – you'd likely be killed in a big crash at 60 km/h – but the relative speed, the flow of normal traffic. If most everyone is going roughly the same speed, they're less likely to run into each other.
I'm not sure what the 85th percentile speed is in Ontario – I'd guess 120 km/h, give or take. But I know that 100 km/h is darn near the 100 percentile, because everybody's going faster than that.
Never mind that trying to enforce a law that is voted against on a daily basis by hundreds of thousands of citizens appears to fly in the face of what it means to live in a democracy.
If we had a limit people could believe in, then enforcement wouldn't be such an issue.
Also, there is no evidence that we'll go 20-over whatever limit is set. France proved that when it began enforcing its 130 km/h limit a couple of years ago.
Finally, we have to deploy scarce police resources where they can do the most good.
Over the recent holiday weekend, it seems all we heard about was speed limit enforcement on the highways, while people were killing themselves and each other on the side roads.
Obviously, we can't have cops on every stretch of rural highway. But as Willie Sutton is alleged to have said in response to why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is."
Instead of dedicating the vast majority of police resources to enforcing an unenforceable and irrelevant speed limit, maybe they should be running left-lane bandits, aggressive drivers and tailgaters.
Like the police say they do, but never seem to.
So, everyone agrees we should be doing more to improve traffic safety. We clearly do not all agree as to what should be done.
I have presented some arguments. If anyone, from OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino on down, wants to discuss any of these, you know how to reach me
Read posting #19 in this thread ... http://forums.corvetteforum.com/show....php?t=1744650
Next time I see Jim, I'll have to have a Chat with him about giving credit where credit is due!
Jim Kenzie
Special to the Star
Jun 07, 2008
Albert Einstein is believed to have said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.
By that definition, our enforcement policy of speed limits on our highways is totally insane.
The 100 km/h limit was instituted after Canada switched to the metric system in the 1970s. It actually represented a drop in the limit, which formerly had been 70 miles per hour, or 112.5 km/h.
Thirty-five years of enforcement have resulted in – what? Cars going 120-to-130 km/h, all day, every day. Jeez, if speed limit enforcement worked, don't you think we'd all be driving 100 km/h by now?
Those same highways have by far our lowest fatality rates. Am I missing something here?
Apparently I am, judging by some of the reaction to my street racer column a couple of weeks ago.
First, understand that the Star's letters to the editor policy states that every reasonable viewpoint will be expressed. The number of letters printed does not in any way reflect the volume received on any given viewpoint. My editor says I get the letters and emails that support me, while he gets the angry ones. I did get a few of those too, but I can tell you that my mail is running 10-to-one on my side.
Second, complainants: read the column again. Where do I ever advocate street racing?
Of course I don't.
I was using a bit of humour – street racing in a Volkswagen Jetta Station Wagon Diesel Automatic! Street racing in a Smart car! That's funny stuff, kids – to illustrate the idiocy of Ontario Highway Traffic Act section 172, which equates fairly normal and certainly common commuting speeds with street racing.
Among other things, this denigrates the fight against real street racing. Where's the outrage over the irresponsibility of that?
Never mind that turning a police officer into judge, jury and executioner appears, as one lawyer correspondent pointed out, to be blatantly unconstitutional. Whatever happened to your day in court?
(I heard earlier this week that the first Charter of Rights court challenge to this statute was to be filed this past Thursday. Can't wait for that one.)
We build highways capable of speeds in the 120 to 130 km/h range. We build cars that are capable of these speeds, and more. As another correspondent noted, we have had 35 years of technological development since the 100 km/h limit was introduced.
Personally, I put universal fitment of radial tires near the top of that list. But we also have stronger, more crash-proof structures, and smarter seatbelt systems, which, along with legislation and enforcement, have led to vastly higher belt use rates than we had back then.
Directional stability control systems, which really do prevent crashes, are starting to work their way down into the mainstream. Airbags, ABS and other technologies don't have as big a statistical impact; you should pardon the expression, but are also nearly universal. There is no doubt our cars are safer than they were.
We give licences to people which, considerable evidence perhaps to the contrary, indicates at least to the recipients that they are capable of driving at these speeds.
And guess what? For the most part, they are. Millions of individual trips are completed every day in this country, at these speeds, in complete safety.
To those who say we should drive slower to save fuel, you're welcome to do so, as long as you stay in the right lane. Well, you should stay there anyway, unless you're passing someone.
But should someone who drives a Smart car be allowed to drive 130 km/h, while a big SUV be restricted to 100?
Let the price of fuel be the determinant. You can choose a fuel-efficient car. You can choose to drive at whatever speed you're comfortable with, up to the (hopefully new) limit. You can choose to do both. You can choose to do neither, and face the consequences.
That's what it means to have a free market in a free country.
So, why can't there be an efficiency dividend for the progress we've made in the past 35 years?
As I say over and over, speed isn't the problem; speed is the objective. If we weren't in a hurry, we'd never build highways, we'd go slower – and we'd be less safe.
Canada has seen traffic fatalities drop, not only in absolute numbers – from more than 5,000 annually 35 years ago to about 2,700 now – but even more impressively, on a relative basis, compared to the number of kilometres we drive. That's huge progress.
I understand that every casualty, whether a death or serious injury, represents a deep tragedy for the victims, and their families and friends.
I know this personally. Before I was even born, my 5-year-old sister was run over by a truck, right in front of our house. The ramifications for our family continue to this day, 65 years and three generations later.
And I have never been able to imagine how tough it must have been for the truck driver, although he was not in any way at fault.
This incident informs everything I have ever written on traffic safety. I want all of us – the car companies, car consumers, drivers, the police, the courts, the politicians, the highway designers – to focus on things that will work, or at least might have a chance of working, not on political grandstanding ploys or PR campaigns.
Thirty-five years of trying to enforce an artificially low speed limit surely has proven that it has no chance. Albert Einstein was right. King Canute was wrong.
Ontario justifiably brags about having the safest highways in North America. And no doubt we should never stop trying to get better.
So, what should we do? Well, we could look at other jurisdictions, to see what they do.
Many countries in Europe have speed limits of 130 km/h (France, Spain and Germany, except in the latter case where on some stretches of autobahn there are no limits at all). Many more have limits of 120 km/h.
Europeans generally drive cars that are smaller and less crash resistant than ours. This also contributes to the fact that they get vastly better fuel consumption than we do.
European freeways are generally not as well engineered as our better highways either. Yet despite all this, they have similar if not better fatality rates than we do.
A system that is more environmentally friendly, faster, more efficient and just as safe? I'm having a lot of trouble seeing any downside here. Isn't it at least worth a look?
So, what do they do that is so different?
Regular readers will have heard all this before. But the one thing that really stands out when driving in Europe – much more than the higher allowed speed – is lane discipline. They drive right, pass left.
Part of this is highway design: the driving lane (the right lane for most; the left lane in England) almost never disappears. People can be confident that they can sit there doing whatever speed they choose, and neither get run off the road by a transport truck, nor have the lane disappear by magically turning into an off-ramp.
This would take a week and a few hundred litres of lane-marking paint to fix here, but I can't get Canadian highway designers or the provincial Ministry of Transportation to even recognize it as an issue.
Part of it is education. Are Europeans inherently better drivers than we are? I must have missed that lesson in school.
No doubt Europe has tougher driver licensing regulations than we do, and if the powers that be here really wanted to make things better, they'd be pushing for that, and not more photo radar cameras in Mississauga.
Next, we should do what traffic engineers have always advocated: set a speed limit that reflects the 85th percentile, the speed below which a total of 85 per cent of the traffic is doing, assuming good road conditions.
The point here is that all evidence suggests it is not the absolute speed that's the problem – you'd likely be killed in a big crash at 60 km/h – but the relative speed, the flow of normal traffic. If most everyone is going roughly the same speed, they're less likely to run into each other.
I'm not sure what the 85th percentile speed is in Ontario – I'd guess 120 km/h, give or take. But I know that 100 km/h is darn near the 100 percentile, because everybody's going faster than that.
Never mind that trying to enforce a law that is voted against on a daily basis by hundreds of thousands of citizens appears to fly in the face of what it means to live in a democracy.
If we had a limit people could believe in, then enforcement wouldn't be such an issue.
Also, there is no evidence that we'll go 20-over whatever limit is set. France proved that when it began enforcing its 130 km/h limit a couple of years ago.
Finally, we have to deploy scarce police resources where they can do the most good.
Over the recent holiday weekend, it seems all we heard about was speed limit enforcement on the highways, while people were killing themselves and each other on the side roads.
Obviously, we can't have cops on every stretch of rural highway. But as Willie Sutton is alleged to have said in response to why he robbed banks, "That's where the money is."
Instead of dedicating the vast majority of police resources to enforcing an unenforceable and irrelevant speed limit, maybe they should be running left-lane bandits, aggressive drivers and tailgaters.
Like the police say they do, but never seem to.
So, everyone agrees we should be doing more to improve traffic safety. We clearly do not all agree as to what should be done.
I have presented some arguments. If anyone, from OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino on down, wants to discuss any of these, you know how to reach me
06-07-2008, 08:47 AM
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06-07-2008, 11:29 AM
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Jim's email is: jim@jimkenzie.com
From a quick look the Star's website the Wheel's editor is:
Mark Richardson Email: wheels@thestar.ca