Sign Language

I saw a sign on the motorway onramp today – “Speak up and live, shut up and die.” Hmmm… Another well meaning but probably totally misguided attempt to hold back the road toll from the same sort of people who brought you ‘Speed Kills’ and ‘Speed Cameras are Good for You’. The signs you see on the sides of Auckland’s motorways are of course aimed at the younger, male drivers who tend to drive faster than average, and are apparently the leading cause of death after Cancer and Sticking Your Hand In The Toaster.

The approach has obviously been taken from several Communist Bloc countries during the early 1980s, although of course then the message was ‘Speak up and die, shut up and live’. Not that a Trabant was capable of exceeding any speed limit then in existence anyway. The KGB had to carry out traffic control duties in T64 tanks, which were of course not ideal for car chases. The solution was the Trabant, a car made from compressed cardboard and powered by engines taken from ex soviet army lawn mowers. But I digress…

Apart from the slightly sexist slant of the various Slow Down signs, has anyone anticipated the possible outcomes of this particular approach? I’d particularly like to know who came up with the brilliant idea of sticking large, attention directing signs at motorway onramps, exactly the sort of place where drivers should be concentrating on joining a moving line of traffic often traveling at a reasonable pace. A place where it is often necessary to be accelerating strongly before joining the traffic. It’s the perfect place for someone to start screaming ’slow down!’. That’s if it happens at all.

How many women are going to turn to the youngish male driver positively fizzing with testosterone and teenage angst and demand that he hold back his raging powerhouse of automotive pleasure. I don’t know a hell of a lot about female psychology but I’d like to think that I know quite a lot about the male side of things.

Telling the average male to slow down is far more likely to make him speed up. And just getting the message through to the driver could be a problem solely because of the three hundred zillion watt stereo rattling the door panels and producing so much sound it sets off earthquake seismographs. Then again, I suppose that’s why text messaging was invented. If that fails, there’s always semaphore.

A better message for the signs would perhaps be ‘Learn to drive properly you useless moron’. This would of course have the added affect of directly relating to at least 95 percent of drivers. But I guess that ensuring the people on our roads have more driving ability than the Madagascar Lemur was never a high priority.

Better to concentrate on the symptoms rather than the disease. After all, if we all drove competently the road toll would be a shadow of it’s former self and the transport authorities would have no stick to wave over our heads when they announce a new batch of speed cameras and shock horror advertising.

But what effect will the ‘Speak up and Live’ signs have on the older, rather more paranoid passenger, the one who thinks that anything faster than walking pace is a little on the risky side and that 50km/h is the sort of speed that got James Dean killed. Usually teamed up with an equally elderly silver haired driver wearing a flat golfing cap, this is the sort of car that is already circulating the city at speeds a snail would be chuffed to achieve.

If the signs work their magic on these particular drivers you can expect to see a line of cars patiently waiting at motorway onramps, indicators flashing plaintively in the hope that someone – probably an equally elderly white haired driver – will take pity on them, gently pull to a stop on the motorway and wave them through.

Into this mixture we add the young drivers thrusting their cars onto the motorway, eager to show their passengers that they can go even faster, and the normal everyday drivers who are quite confused by the whole thing and are consequently driving down the wrong side of the motorway. Road safety – it may not always work, but it sure is entertaining.