Speed control, humps and strips

During my five years in Parliament and four years in Cabinet, I lobbied hard for speed control on the roads of Malawi.

The carnage on our roads was not acceptable.

Just imagine the death toll on the roads used by some 300 000 vehicles is twice that of a European country with seven million cars!

Yet our roads are actually footpaths and bicycle tracks also used by cars. Pedestrians are not separated and protected from motorised traffic and the attitude towards cyclists, who have the same rights as motorists, is appalling.

Car maintenance and quality are generally substandard. With a few thousand kwacha extra, one can easily get a certificate of fitness (COF) without anyone looking at the car.

Driver training is poor. Someone who has just obtained a driving licence, has never driven a car outside town, does not know how to overtake another car, has never driven at night freely operate our roads.

In checkpoints, police rarely check the lights and one can easily pass at night with no lights at all.

These issues make speed control imperative.

The police have cameras to keep speeding in check, but there appears to be no policy for speed control.

One is required to drive 50 kilometres (km) per hour in a built area, but what is a build-up area? Is it two houses, 10 or 100?

It is the government’s duty to indicate this, not the driver’s or police’s choice.

Why should one drive 50 km/hour through villages on the way to Phalombe, which has few road users, yet be allowed to drive 60 km per hour through the populous Mbayani Township, Che Mussa and Chirimba in Blantyre City?

How come I have to drive 50 km/hour a kilometre before any house or without any soul walking on the Bembeke Turn-off stretch on the M1, where the police with speed cameras love fining motorists?

Other speed controls being implemented wrongly include speed humps.

The ‘mountain ranges’ constructed across some roads are too high and steep, forcing cars to a near-standstill to cross them.

With my small vehicle, I have to cross them at an angle of 45 degrees across the road to avoid scraping the vehicle’s belly.

The wrongly designed humps do untold damage to cars. On tarmacs, you will see the scratches made by cars that flew past them and then hit the road hard.

Few humps are painted, but this wears out quickly. 

On the Michiru Road in Blantyre is a speed hump just in a tree shade. No warning. No paint. The damage it has done is shocking.

The future is for electric cars, but they have sensitive battery packs stored in the bottom of the car. If the bottom hits the ground, serious damage may occur to the batteries.

In handbooks and on the internet, one can find detailed specifications for decent-speed humps.

A hump only needs to be 50 millimetres high and two metres wide to slow down a car to 50km per hour. This will not damage the car if one mistakenly hits the hump at a higher speed.

Then there are rumble strips that are supposed to warn drivers to slow down. If not followed by a hump, they are plainly dangerous.

At Chiweto in Chirimba Township, rumble strips alert drivers to the pedestrian crossing ahead. But if one slows down, a speeding car overtakes right there just to cross the rumble strip rrrrrrr instead of tapa tapa tapa slowly. This is dangerous for pedestrians.

The nasty rumble strips on the M1 near Mzimba warn road users of tight curves and steep slopes ahead, but one has to either slow down to 10 km/hour or speed up.  

Please, bring some sanity into speed control measures.