IN its efforts at ensuring safety standards for road users, the Federal Road Safety Corps, FRSC, restated commitment towards the introduction of speed limit device. The move, it was gathered, became imperative given the increase in road traffic accidents and the need to conform to global practices. Though controversies had trailed the introduction of the device, which FRSC said would ensure sanity on the highways, the ever rising rate of road crashes seems to make its enforcement inevitable. Since the underpinning reason for the furore of its planned introduction was discovered to be ignorance on the part of most drivers, the commission recently outlined its advantages and why it should be supported.
Findings by Motoring Vanguard, showed that the regulation on compulsory use of speed limiting device on vehicles in Nigeria has been in the FRSC Establishment Act and the National Road Traffic Regulation since 2004 and retained in the subsequent amendments. Indeed, speed is a key risk factor in road traffic injuries, influencing both the risk of a road crash as well as the severity of the injuries and deaths. Specifically, speed was found to increase driver’s response time to objects and risk of collision, reduces the driver’s ability to steer safely and around curves and objects on the roads, extend the distance necessary to stop a vehicle and increases the distance a vehicle travels while the driver reacts to a dangerous situation.
Speed limiter prevent the vehicle from reaching certain speed. Apart from these primary functions, investigations indicated that the policy if successfully implemented would provide socio-economic advantages for the nation. Notably, lower speed results in less fuel consumption by vehicles and also cut down vehicle maintenance cost in addition to the slowing down of the depreciation value making vehicle last longer. Significantly, it would impact positively in changing the individual driving behaviour which has been hard to achieve over the years. The pre-set limit of vehicle, is not left out, as it would reduce the speed of vehicle to pre-set limit thus reducing overall crash risk and likely to lessen severity of crash. In addition, vehicle owners and fleet operators stand to gain from the good monitoring mechanism.
However, on a larger scale, it was found to be capable of engendering compliance to the ECOWAS mandate, fulfilment of the Corps statutory functions through good practice. To a large extent, losses associated with speed related crashes are expected to reduce or possibly eliminated. When that is achieved, the young virile members of the society would be saved from deaths and maiming associated with speed induced crashes. On the sidelines, it would enable more relaxed driving and lower insurance premium as consequence of fewer crashes. Drivers’ speed behaviour Indeed, some may still be wondering what could have informed this with the presence of conventional methods of limiting. In this regard, the most widely used strategies to mitigate drivers’ speed behaviour through education, training and re-training, provision of speed limiting signs and of speed calming measures in the design and construction of highways, introduction of speed radar guns and enforcement, are readily referenced. Checks, however, found these traditional methods to be ineffective, necessitating the Speed Limiter. For instance, it had long been established that lower speed variance can be linked to fewer crashes and compliance with speed limits reduces the chances of vehicles getting involved in frequent of crashes and severity of bodily injuries.
In fact, Section 99 of the National Road Traffic Regulation further buttressed the import of limiting speed rate. ‘’The minimum speed of any motor vehicle shall be 45km/hr and maximum speed 100km/hr, except where otherwise indicted by a sign as prescribed in Section 9 of this regulation,” it stated. In the present scenario, its becomes pertinent to state that Nigerian drivers hardly keep to approved speed limits which is the major cause of road traffic accidents. Apart from the death of the Minster of State for Labour, Mr. James Ocholi and some members of his family in a road crash, similar accidents had claimed the lives of eminent Nigerians in the past. Not many of the drivers know the approved speed limit on various roads, hence the loss of lives and property. In most developed countries, speed limit device has been instrumental to sanity on the highways,as offenders are often lawfully punished.
SOURCE: Vanguardng