London, May 15, 2006. “Prince” Naseem Hamed is in jail. On Friday he was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment for dangerous driving. It is a dramatic fall from grace for the flamboyant former world boxing champion. The man who was only beaten once in the boxing ring in 37 fights has been brought down by his love of fast cars. His vice was not drugs or alcohol but the thrill of speeding.
It is a common vice. In Hamed’s case, his fame and fortune enabled him to indulge in it to excess. He had a stable of cars — the kind that young men dream of — and he liked to drive them fast, how else? He was known in his hometown of Sheffield for his fast driving. The police had stopped him on several occasions for speeding and he had at one stage been banned from driving for a year. The judge who sentenced him to jail on Friday told Hamed that he had clearly not got speeding out of his system as a young man.
Hamed’s driving style reads straight out of a certain kind of Hollywood movie. He cut other cars up, overtook cars on narrow roads, whizzed passed other cars at phenomenal speed. He drove like the wind as the saying goes. Speeding is undeniably glamorous. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Fast, expensive cars are more than a status symbol; they represent power, virility, and masculinity. Give a man the keys to a powerful car and the urge to speed will be irresistible. The faster he drives, the more he will impress. The younger the man the stronger the urge. These are stereotypes but there is some truth in them. There is something undeniably potent about the combination of testosterone and a powerful engine.
But it is wrong to think of speeding as purely a male problem, or to label it as something that the young and reckless do and then grow out of. The problem with speeding is that it has become normative. Speeding is a little like tax evasion, something that may be illegal but that is socially acceptable up to a point. Tell someone you were caught speeding and the reaction will usually be one of sympathy. Unlike drunk driving that — at least in Britain — has now become strictly taboo, speeding is seen as something you can get away with, just so long as you do not overdo it.
Speed kills. That is the stark message that governments have tried, and to some extent failed, to fully convince us of.
The facts are rather bleak. In Britain today, one in fifteen children can expect to be injured in a road accident by their 16th birthday. If you hit a pedestrian driving at 40 miles per hour, there is a 90 percent chance you will kill the pedestrian. Reduce your speed to 30 miles an hour and this percentage goes down to 20 percent. At 20 miles an hour, it drops down to 2.5 percent. All it takes is an instant for a child to run into the road and all the driver has is a fraction of a second to apply the brakes. So much rests on so little.
The danger of speeding in urban zones is something most of us understand; yet still, it is altogether too common to go just that little bit faster because you are late for work, or distracted, or just plain impatient. Speeding on the motorway is another matter. You will hear passionate arguments about why it is really not that dangerous at all. The speed limits are seen as outdated and a hindrance. The example of the German autobahn where there are no speed limits are often cited as an example of how it should be. I must confess that the statistics leave me confused. I have seen some that point to the correlation between higher speed limits and rising motorway casualties and others that point mildly in the opposite direction. What seems a clearer conclusion is that it is not speeding per se which increases the risk and mortality of an accident but dangerous driving. In ideal conditions, on a clear well-built road, where all the drivers maintain their distance from other cars and where all cars are traveling at roughly the same speed, the probability of an accident is relatively low. But those are not the conditions in which we live.
What strikes me the most about driving is that we have such a cavalier attitude toward it. How many of us are afraid of planes and yet will get behind the wheel of a car without any anxiety? And yet we are far more likely to be in a car accident than in a plane crash. The majority of accidents are caused by human error. We think we are better drivers than we really are and we underestimate the risks we take when we drive. Something as every day as lighting a cigarette or changing a CD is enough of a distraction to reduce our reaction time significantly.
The data on mobile phones is rather shocking. Talking on a phone whilst driving has been found to reduce reaction times by 50 percent, that is more than the effect of a unit of alcohol! And using a hands-free kit makes almost no significant difference. It’s the distraction factor that matters.
Attitudes toward speeding vary with geography. As a friend once said to me, the hotter the climate the faster they go. In Saudi Arabia, dangerous driving is a serious problem that the authorities have tried to tackle as best they can but there is still much work to be done. Speed kills, there is no two ways about it. And the more we glamorize fast cars and speeding, the more we contribute to its death toll. Perhaps the example of “Prince” Naseem Hamed will alert more people to the consequences of dangerous driving. He showed off, acted recklessly and nearly killed a man. Now he is in jail.
