Easter is a time when many families take to the roads for a break or to visit family and friends.
Often there are congested freeways and roads, drivers travelling for extended periods of time into the evenings and sometimes even towing a trailer or caravan. This all leads to higher risk with the inevitable accidents taking place. Every year there are many accidents and fatalities reported in the press. Dave Johnston, a consultant for the Matrix Road Safety Association, offers these road-survival tips:
Keep a minimum of 3 seconds following distance. Failure to adhere to this increases the risk considerably resulting in the driver often running out of space and/or time. This 3 second following distance is extremely important in a pre-pass situation, ensuring added forward visibility and space to increase speed before overtaking.
Learn to look where your vehicle will be in 10 to 15 seconds time. This ensures that you will get early warnings of trouble brewing up ahead. When you cannot see because of some vision barrier such as a truck, blind rise, blind corner etc, slow down and anticipate problems. This is how things ‘come out of nowhere’ like potholes, tyre casings, animals and pedestrians. Take care at night where you have limited visibility. On dipped beams, headlights only shine a maximum of 45m by law. At 120km/h you are covering 33.3m per second and drivers have an average reaction time of 1 second! Considering this it’s clear to see why the vast majority of pedestrian deaths occur at night.
Let’s work together to reduce accidents this Easter time.