No boo hoo

I find it strange to hear people upset about the fatal auto race crash this past weekend. Of course, I don't wish sudden untimely death on anyone, but more than mourning the poor guy who perished, there's a lot of hand-wringing about how the conditions weren't safe.

Well, DUH. In what universe is it ever safe to drive in heavy traffic on a curvy road at 200 miles per hour? Anyone who's ever tried that on the Schuykill can tell you that it's no easy feat getting from King of Prussia to Center City in 4 1/2 minutes without crashing.

Really, the fact that there are so few crashes is a testament to the skill of the drivers and a reasonably strict code of conduct, but there's an inherent tension between speed and safety. I think people tend to underestimate the force involved in hitting a stationary object that doesn't give when you hit it. The best way it's ever been explained to me was to try to imagine what it would be like if you were just standing there and a brick wall came along and hit you at 40 miles per hour.

And the problem with high speed is that the force with which you hit the wall is based on the amount of deceleration you do, or how quickly your velocity decreases (which is pretty quick when you hit a wall). I could throw some numbers around, but I know neither what they signify nor what they really mean in terms of bodily harm. Key point though: Newton's laws of motion say that if you hit an immovable object that the object necessarily hits back with an equal force (that's the only way the motion can stop). That's actually the force that crumples your car. The way you get hurt is that you are moving at the same speed of the car and do not stop until something applies an equal and opposite force to you. This tends to hurt.

The reason we have airbags is that they increase the time it takes for that force to be applied- the stopping is more gradual, and since time is the denominator of the force formula, the bigger it is, the less force. Less force means less pain and less frequent death.

In any event, there's only so much you can do to mitigate the damage done to the body in a high speed crash. And that's not even talking about the fire part, which is another inevitable result of using combustable fuel to power the cars.

I certainly don't think there's anything wrong with imposing safety measures, but unless you take some of the speed out of the equation, so to speak, there's only a limited amount you can do.