Last week, in the town of Flémalle on the outskirts of Liege in Eastern Belgium, a flying projectile blew a massive hole in a sports hall where, just minutes earlier, children had been playing basketball.
The youngsters had cleared out to the changing rooms moments before more than a tonne of steel burst through the wall. A few minutes more on the court and there could have been a massacre.
The missile was a flying Mercedes, with a 25-year-old professional (male) footballer at the wheel. He was apparently driving way over the speed limit, with some reports estimating his velocity at 200 km/h. He appears to have lost control and hit a roundabout, causing the vehicle to fly into the air and smash through the high wall of the sports hall. An investigation is underway into the cause of the crash.
But the initial reporting of this event was truly bizarre. RTBF, the Belgian-French national broadcaster began its news article from the perspective of worried football fans: The type of news that makes you go cold. With the pro league restarting this weekend after a break for international matches, we learn that Sofiane Kiyine, from club OHL, had a serious road accident on Thursday evening.
The football team tweeted that their player was ‘involved in a car accident yesterday. We wish him the best of luck.’ Not a word for the parents of the young basketball players whose lives he almost ended.
Is this normal? A wreckless high-speed crash that could easily have killed multiple schoolchildren is mainly a problem for football fans who may miss out on seeing a member of their team walk onto the pitch at their next game. Have we all gone mad?
How is it possible that we, as a society, have become so collectively immune to road violence that our ability to tune it out only seems to increase by the day? The week of the nearly fatal sports hall crash coincidentally came almost one year to the day that Belgium woke up to one of its most brutal road tragedies. Carnival revelers, going door to door in the early hours, near the town of La Louvière were savagely mowed down by a driver returning from a night club. He was also driving way over the speed limit. Six were killed, and 30 were seriously injured. The driver of the BMW was filming on his mobile phone as he tore through those residential streets.
And while these are extreme examples, the problem of speeding goes much wider. Also in the same week as this horrific anniversary, the Belgian road safety institute VIAS published data that clearly show the problem of speeding in Belgium is getting worse, by most measures. If projectile Mercedes and carnival massacres are not enough to make the scales fall from politicians’ eyes, what will it take?
20,000 people are killed on European roads every year. Excessive and inappropriate speed is accountable for about one-third of fatal collisions. Speed kills. Speed kills thousands. And speed injures hundreds of thousands.
An ‘accident’ is no accident when speeding is involved. Speeding in a car is like letting a toddler handle a gun: it’s something that shouldn’t be allowed to happen. And fixing it is easy. Speed limiters to prevent a Mercedes ever driving 200 km/h on an inter-urban road next to a children’s basketball club. Intelligent speed assistance to slow the car down automatically when a driver tries to race past a speed limit sign. Speed cameras to remove that sense of impunity many young men feel when they exceed the limit. We have the tools. We’ve had them for a long time. When will policymakers wake up and end this nightmare?
