Safe driving tips on Kenyan high ways

It is really sad to imagine the number of lives that we lose every month on our roads. Thousands others are left maimed for life, partly or completely incapacitated to be able to engage in any nation building activity. The effect is multi-pronged; first in case of fatalities, families are left without bread winners, second there is an ever increasing demand for specialized treatment to such injuries as spinal injuries. As you are all aware, especially from the current campaign of, BRING ZACK BACK HOME, we do not have a centre to take care of spinal injuries. You can imagine the suffering to these patients without any treatment on site, especially those who are unable travel all the way to South Africa or Egypt, in which the nearest spinal code injury treatment centres, are located, to receive treatment. Third there is reduced or no productivity at all from the accident survivors depending on the extent of their injuries. 


So we all know careless driving can end your life and the lives of others or leave you maimed for life. Consequently we all resolve to drive carefully, observing every rule we learnt at the driving school. Always keep left; never overtake on a continuous yellow line, round corners, etc. Is that all it will take to arrive alive? Well, as much as this will guarantee our safety on the road, we have to wake up to the grim reality that there are those drivers that may decide to ignore these rules and endanger the lives of other road users including ours. This could be a public vehicle driver more intent on making more money than on the safety of the passengers. It could be a young driver and his friends wanting to show off to his friends how fast his sports car can move. And all enjoying the thrill of the speed and throwing all caution to the wind. Here are a few things you can do to stay safe despite all the madness on our roads. 

Climbing lane is not labeled Lorries only

I once had a near death experience. I was climbing one of the many hills just before Narok on the Narok-Mae Mahiu road. I was doing about 120km/h having come down at almost 150km/h on the opposite hill in order to gather enough momentum to climb the other. This is usually a common but rather risky habbit of most drivers when a road goes over adjacent hills or valley escarpments. You accelerate to very high speed when climbing down one side in order to gather momentum to climb the other side. Well, there was a bend on the climbing side so I couldn’t see much of the oncoming traffic. The climbing lane was free but I kept to the middle lane which is rightfully my lane.  Just as I negotiated the bend I came face to face with two giant buses occupying the two right-most lanes leaving out only the climbing lane and coming down as though the devil himself was right behind them, each trying to outdo the other. Needless to say, I was on a head-on collision path with one of the beasts. What happened next I really can’t say I was in control, a Higher being was. Mind you my entire family was inside that car. You can imagine what happens when you make a near full turn of the steer wheel on car moving at 120km/h in a fraction of a second with merely a whisker to spare. Everybody is screaming in the car and you can feel the agonizing eternity it takes as the cars suspensions are pulled to the limit on one side and compressed to a dead end on the other as the entire weight of the car is shifted of from one set of suspensions to the other in the swerve and counter swerve maneuvers. My luck was that the climbing lane was free and had room to swerve to. The car made about three nerve raking swings before leveling out and leaving me completely shaken and my passengers in utter disbelief of what had just happened. From that day on, I usually keep to the climbing lane if it is free and only get out of it when overtaking. From this incident I also learnt that just a fraction of a second of concentration when it matters most can be the difference between life and death on the road.

Use the overdrive button when going downhill

I stand corrected but I believe all automatic cars, which have now become so prevalent, have the overdrive button. This is a push button normally located on the upper right side of the gear shift lever of the automatic car. Overdrive is normally on and will be switched off when you press this button. A display O/D OFF on the dashboard appears after you press this button, indicating overdrive is off. This basically serves to cut out gear four of the automatic car. The car can now only go up to gear three. If you have driven an automatic car downhill you will notice that even if you took your foot completely of the gas pedal, the car will still accelerate. Instead of you resting your foot on the brake pedal to regulate speed, simply press the O/D button. This will limit the car’s speed to about 100km/h. This speed will remain constant; you can take your feet off the gas and breaks. Never drive at high speed downhill for the same reason Lorries move at snail’s pace downhill especially when loaded. Just know that in the grand scale of things, your car might be small and easy to maneuver but when you are going full speed downhill then the mechanisms of your car break and suspension will be stretched to a breaking point in case of an emergency just as the lorry will not be able to break from its sheer weight. I know airplane wings are tested to stand double the weight of their intended operation load without breaking, but I have not heard of someone testing the car’s breaking system on top speed with double its load and going downhill. So keep to what is a safe speed. Use the O/D button. If you want an even lower speed, simply pull the gear lever to 2 on the gear shift panel. This will limit your speed to about 60-80km/h and you can take your feet off the gas and break. Under normal driving conditions make sure the O/D OFF is not displayed on the dashboard. O/D OFF display during overtaking can be detrimental. This is because your car will struggle to hit a top speed needed to overtake a fast moving vehicle.

Garbage in, garbage out principle

The brain is one of the most complex computers; making man’s most advanced computer a child’s play. But just like all computers, the brain gives output based on the input and its state of service. If your computer is infested with viruses which have corrupted its memories and other vital functionalities, you don’t expect much service from it. If the inputs devices like the keyboard are faulty or missing some keys, again you might end up keying wrong info for processing.
Overtaking of another vehicle on the road might seem like a simple task. But if we imagine the number of head on-collisions that occur then we might as well try to keenly study what goes on through the brain when overtaking. From this it will also serve to help us know in what state your brain should be in order to execute a safe overtaking. The main receptors to the environment are our eyes and ears. We need to look ahead and see that the road is clear enough. The car is also fitted with two side mirrors and a driving mirror to enable us accurately see and judge how far behind and approximate the speed with which the traffic behind us is approaching and whether it wants to overtake. Sometimes we may forget to look on the mirrors and just want to overtake or worse still a vehicle might have begun overtaking without us noticing, and therefore no longer on the field of view of the mirrors, especially those bathroom mirrors that we fit on our cars after thieves have made away with the factory fitted mirrors. The bathroom mirrors have very narrow field of view and you might miss or have difficulty seeing traffic that wants to overtake you. Be extra careful when using these mirrors. In case you deviate from your lane the overtaking driver may honk on his horn. Needless to say you need to be attentive to all sounds around, both from your engine and any other external sound. Please don’t drive with blaring music as you will be clouding one of your most important receptor on the road, the ears.  There might be an oncoming vehicle and the brain needs to judge its speed and distance and compare it with our current speed and the speed of the car we want to overtake and make an accurate guess that if we accelerate to a certain speed we will be able to overtake safely and be out of the way before the oncoming traffic reaches us. If your brain misjudges any input here or misses out a certain input required to judge whether it is safe to overtake or not, then this is a recipe for disaster. The brain functions at its optimum when it’s free of any corruption. Corruption of the brain functionalities is brought about by such things as alcohol, loud noise, sleep, fatigue and other factors that may lessen attention. When the brain fails to make an accurate judgment, you are likely to end up on a head-on collision. If you have any doubt on whether you will manage the dash before the oncoming traffic reaches you, don’t attempt it.

Fuel saving tips

With the cost of living rising every day, it is time to consider how much you are spending on fuel for your car. Ask yourself whether every drop of fuel that goes into the tank gives you real mileage. Do you fuel your car only to spend half of it in rapid accelerations and abrupt stops?


Let me explain a few principles that will perhaps help you save fuel if not making you a better driver.

THE LAW OF INERTIA

This law simply states that any physical object will resist change to its state of motion or rest. This tells you that a stationery object needs a lot of force to start moving and equally a moving object requires a lot of force to stop it from moving. Of course this force is relative to the size of the object. Thus it requires more force to move a bus from 0km/h as opposed to a Vitz. However irrespective of  the size of your car, you will always spend more fuel to start it moving from a complete stop as opposed to fuel needed to keep it moving. Again it will need more fuel to accelerate to a higher speed as opposed to accelerating to a lower speed and leveling out. Therefore a fuel saving tip here would be to try and minimize the number of stops you make. How can you minimize the number of stops? Start by anticipating the stops. Why should you accelerate all the way up to the traffic lights or the back of the track only to hit the brakes hard. Drive moderately on slow moving traffic and you will find yourself crossing the the traffic lights without stopping. The lights will always be green for you since you are not trying to beat them. So by the time you arrive at the next, it has also turned green. In fact as you near obvious stops like round-abouts and junctions, lift your foot of the gas pedal and let the car slow down naturally.


Once again if you are not on high speed, the energy spent breaking the car is less since the resistance to stop is not as high as when on high speed. Here you also have a direct saving on your break pads. They don't have to endure so much force.

WORK DONE

In Physics, work done equals the mass of a body multiplied by the distance travelling by that body. The point to note here is, two bodies that travel same distance but have different masses require different energy amounts to cover same distance. This very easily explains that your car will consume more fuel on a full boot than when the boot is empty. We all love travelling upcountry and filling our car boots with food items when travelling back to town. Do yourself a favour and make sure you get all items out of the boot before you resume the normal trips to office in your car. At this point your might consider co-sharing fuel costs with all your friends that you always give a lift in your car! You might also want to re-consider the wisdom of always having your tank full when on short trips like going to office and back. Do you really need all that load of fuel? Just make sure your fuel gauge does not fall below the quarter mark but certainly I wouldn't advocate for a full tank on office-to-home trips. Unless of course you have to drive 200km every day!

DENSITY

The time of day you fuel your car can determine the amount of fuel you get in terms of mass. The fuel pumps measure the fuel in terms of volume. Therefore on cold morning hours you will get more mass of fuel for the same volume since the density is high. V = m/d (V=volume, m=mass, d=density). Volume being constant, mass has to increase with increase in density in order for the pump to measure same volume. Unlike when fueling during hot afternoon hours, when the density of fuel is so low. This simply means you get a lighter load of fuel. certainly you will cover more mileage on a heavier load of fuel as opposed to a lighter one on the same price. Take this analogy, you have a glass full of raw popcorn seeds and another full of heated and puffed up popcorn seeds. They both have same volume but weigh completely different because of the parking density of the seeds.