"Look Out! Speed Bump!!"

 

The Autobahn between Frankfurt and Cologne in Germany has no speed limits posted. If you like to drive at a sedate 110 KPH, you need to stay in the right-hand lane, or better yet, in the ditch; at that speed, you’re a highway hazard. In Mexico, speed limit signs exist, as do stop signs (ALTO, meaning Stop or Tall, take your pick, language learners). But the speed limit is whatever your vehicle and your nerves can manage, except governed by whatever is ahead, like side-by-side trucks, or a series of suspension-jarring speed bumps.

In Canada, a highway  passing through a town has reduced speed limits posted, and a flashing display will tell you your speed, will sometimes even flash you a happy face if you’re under the limit. In Mexico and in Panama (incidentally the only two Latin American countries I’ve visited) speed bumps are assigned the job of slowing down traffic. The sign warning of an upcoming speed bump, though, is too long to be read at 140 KPH (“obstaculo de volocidad por delante”) so the first indication for the novice driver in Mexico might well be a passenger or driver launched through the sunroof. An abrupt education in paying closer attention!

For me, The interesting question in all this lies in deciding how best to gain public cooperation for anything, anything as seemingly benign as not littering or as consequential as driving slowly through a village where a child might be running out into traffic at any time. Every strategy has, of course been tried historically, from persuasion, to punishment, to rewards, to sheer force.

I’m sure that if the penalty for making a U-turn at a controlled corner were legislated to be a minimum of two years in prison, and for exceeding a speed limit, a thousand dollar fine for each KPH over what’s posted, I would sell my car and stay at home … problem solved; cooperation secured. Many, however, might see this as a challenge to offend without getting caught, or just as a colossal infringement on their personal freedom, an impertinence in need of defiance.

I’m betting technology will see us all becoming law abiding citizens, at least on the roads and highways. Each car will be embedded with a chip that transmits the driving speed and sundry possible driving choices to a central computer, which also automatically adds pluses for good driving and minuses for bad driving and sends you a bill or a cheque at the end of each month based on a legislated formula. Just making up the formula could be a hoot

Road-use Statement for Rhoda Dendron for March, 2027

Driving 100 Km without once exceeding the posted speed limit …………………+10

Changing lanes without proper signalling ………………………………………….-10

Swearing at another driver………………………………………………………….-10

Using a cellphone while driving……………………………………………………..-20

Zipper-merging properly…………………………………………………………….+10

Total………………………………………………………………………………….-20

Credit/Debit………………………………………………………………………….-$40

Payable online at www.bigbrotheriswatching.com

 Take that, Mister “No one tells ME what to do!” 

Probably wouldn’t work, though; tech-savvy people would very soon figure out how to hack into their own cars.

But that’s pretty pessimistic, I admit. We don’t have to breathe tobacco smoke when in a restaurant anymore, and peeing in the public street is rare. Something works, even though it’s not been that long since, for instance, people assumed a right to light up a smoke wherever they wished.

I don’t think shaming would be acceptable as the key to cooperation either. That choice could mean bringing back some variation of that ancient humiliation device; Big Mac Donalson gets caught speeding through town and by way of a corrective measure, he’s tied to a post (or stocks) in the centre of town for an afternoon wearing only his jockeys. 

Speed bumps work. It doesn’t matter if you’re a private citizen commuting to work, or the Minister of Highways being transported by security to a high-level meeting, or a passenger in a fifty-seat luxury bus, or a bank robber in a getaway car; in Mexico everybody slows down for towns, intersections, construction like good little missionary kids. You might say that speed bumps have you administering your own punishment for your own offense … ingenious!

How to apply the principle elsewhere? Now that would take some thinking/planning beyond my inchworm imagination.

Comments to gg.epp41@gmail.com welcomed. 

An Image from Spiritus Mundi

 

An Eigenheim pasture, 2006

Some time ago, I wrote a speculative opinion piece about what the world might look like after the agonies of climate change mitigation and the COVID-19 Pandemic would be behind us. In it, I suggested that gasoline might well be priced at $5.00 per litre in the foreseeable future, that local business and services would improve as travel and transportation becomes expensive enough to drive us all to look—even  harder than we already are—for local alternatives for our food and necessities, fun and games, leisure and shopping, education and faith practice.

               Most of us don’t want to read or hear that kind of prognostication; particularly as we get older, our psychological energies are bent toward fighting change, not creating it. This is a dilemma for all people living in the 2020ish era of human time; rapid transitions are needed; defiance of changes such transitions require is fought tooth and nail. “I’ve always been able to fly to Barbados for a month-long break in my winter, but now the government has let travel prices go so high, I can hardly afford it!”

Poor you.

That governments feel they must add a carbon tax to fossil fuel prices is witness to our stubbornness as citizens, an obstinacy causing us to resist cooperating with absolutely necessary changes unless we’re forced. Perhaps this obstinacy is endemic to human makeup along with the usual handy excuses like, “So I could reduce my carbon footprint by driving less, but my neighbours won’t make this sacrifice, so what’s the point?”

The Industrial Revolution drove people to abandon their peasant, share-cropping agrarian lives for day labour in mills and factories. The Enclosure movement put an end to common-land sheep grazing, and other related changes shepherded people into massively-changed ways of living in the British Empire. I can still remember when the predominant means to a living was for the man of the house to “go to work” doing physical day-labour. Now professional, technical and a myriad of service jobs predominate, and women’s numbers in the “work force” are nearly equal with men’s.

All this to remind ourselves that we are in the throes of one of those periods of significant change for humanity. At 80 years of age, I’m likely to live only somewhere into the time of current turmoil. But I can faintly see some of the ends these early steps are predicting, ends that will be the shapers of the lives of future generations.

For the sake of the children, the participation of the global community in cooperative effort is absolutely essential. Will that spirit of cooperative, can-do finally prevail?

I doubt it. Too often, the spiritus mundi [i] has called to us … and been treated to a middle-finger response.             

---

[i] From W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming. Hard to define, but closest probably to the Christian Holy Spirit. The truth-core of the universe? I understand Spiritus Mundi to be like “the Word” in the opening salvo of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The general theological assessment of John’s Gospel is that it seeks to show that Jesus is God. I think Yeats would probably think of John’s Gospel as showing that Jesus is the incarnation of the Word, i.e., that Jesus came to "read" the word to us who were illiterate. In any case, I read that Yeats saw Spiritus Mundi as the source of inspiration for great art and poetry, two manifestations of spirit-inspiration we mostly “don’t get.”