Jordan Taylor@Jordan_W_Taylor
I don't usually post politics, but…
This month the Irish government starts reducing speed limits by 20kph across local & regional roads, to the limp-hand clapping of people who enjoy having their time stolen.
So what, you only lose 10 minutes, right? Here's my good/ bad take…
There is one truly non-renewable resource on this planet, and it's not petroleum. It's time. We each have an allotment of eighty six thousand, four hundred seconds a day to spend, and you can't buy more. You used up a few reading that. Another one here too. Tension is rising, and I don't want to waste your time, except… someone does.
Tick.
You spend 7 hours asleep. Sometimes more, often less. Sometimes much less.
Tock.
You'll sell another 9 hours, cook and eat another 2, spend 30 minutes making yourself presentable, 90 minutes commuting, an hour working out…
Tick.
Suddenly you've only got three hours of evening quality time left, two where your children will be awake, and only one of them where you're not urging them through pre-bedtime routine.
Tock.
Two hours left. One hour to bond with your children, another with your wife or husband as the big hand moves relentlessly to bedtime again. Where does it all go?
In your twenties your blood constantly boils with urgency, but that's nothing compared with life as a working parent of young children, where time is so rarified you practically awake with a digital countdown timer clicking into being in the corner of your vision.
Life pared down to the minute. No room for error.
In a civilised age there is almost no greater insult than to waste someone's time. It comes with unspoken insult: “Not only is my time more important than yours, but yours is worth nothing at all.”
You wouldn't sit someone down in a chair and waste their time for 10 or 15 minutes a day.
Yet that is exactly what is about to happen in Ireland, as regional & rural speed limits are ratcheted down by 20kph nationwide, to be followed by default 30kph limits in urban areas. Championed by the consistently-vexing Eamonn Ryan and Jack Chambers, the traffic act will add the humiliation ritual of enforced sloth to your daily commute.
But it's only 10 or 15 minutes of your time, and it saves lives?
Fair enough, but let's be pragmatic about this. Ireland averages 150 traffic deaths a year, which are obviously all tragedies, and this measure might save a couple. In the eyes of many that alone might be worth it, and it's hard to argue against that without sounding like a monster.
Well someone has to.
Let's say 12 minutes a day extra in the car for a million motorists (it could easily be 2 million, but we'll be conservative). If the average person lives to 80, that becomes 71 extra lifetimes a year wasted in cars, probably much more. Is that a cost we're willing to bear?
And what if I told you that you might be wasting the best bits of your life this way? I'm serious.
Getting home from work is where we connect with our family. For me, that 10 minutes is the difference that decides if I bathe my toddler, where we play silly games and she fills a jug with bubbles & water to give to her dad as a ‘wonderful drink’... or medicine if I look tired. It's something just between us, and it'll be gone in a year or two. If traffic is slow I lose that opportunity forever.
Multiply this kind of thing by 1 or 2 million people.
It gets more insidious than that: Our opportunities, social circles, jobs, houses, lovers are all limited by our ability to get places. Slow down & that shrinks.
Nobody will resign their job in November because of a speed limit change, but the cumulative effect, over years, is powerful. It's a subtle, nasty form of theft.
Theft of time, opportunity and precious moments.
More time in your car.
We need to make our roads safe, but there are good and bad ways of doing that, and a blanket speed reduction is the latter. It's flypaper on the road to civilization, anti-progress and anti-opportunity.
We should resist it.
