Recently, John Michuki passed away and Kenyans as we are known to do appreciated him greatly after his demise. This is the man who brought sanity to our public transport system.
It was my hope and thinking that in his memory, people would do their part to uphold the traffic rules. (Note, I said people not Matatu drivers). Perhaps the simplest and most obvious way of doing this would be to put on the seatbelt that Michuki went out of his way to have installed in those god forsaken matatus.
Now I know what you are thinking; within Nairobi, matatus mostly have faulty or extremely filthy seatbelts that might tarnish that nice item of clothing from toy market that you are wearing.
But what is the excuse in long distance travelling?
I travelled to Nakuru a few days ago and happened to take a shuttle. The seating on these things is pretty comfortable, the cars are clean and well maintained and the seatbelts as far as I have observed are almost always intact and clean. As such, I see no excuse for anyone to wear none.
A certain police woman at Naivasha was of the same thinking as me. She spotted our matatu, stopped it and had to walk some distance to get to us. As mostly expected with Kenyan traffic police I thought she would go beating around the bush hoping for a bribe. But not this good lady. She had only one issue; the driver was not wearing his seatbelt. She wondered what sort of example he was setting for the passengers.
The driver in his kiss ass demeanor hurriedly put on the seatbelt and the policewoman waved us away. So there I was nodding my head, happy that there was still some good left in the world and making sure that my belt was tight on too. Barely were we out of the officer’s sight than the driver took off his belt grinning like a fool.
As if this was not enough, the man seated next to him and he went on to discuss how the police loved nagging people instead of letting them travel in peace. I could not believe what I was hearing.
I have thought of the situation at length and I think the biggest problem pertaining this is that most of us know nothing about how that little strip of cloth works and how it protects us.
Putting on a seatbelt while travelling dramatically increases your chances of surviving an accident. To understand how the seatbelt works, you first have to understand inertia.
Inertia is an object’s tendency to keep moving until something else works against the motion. Inertia is every objects resistance to changing its speed and direction of travel.
For instance if a car is speeding at a speed of 50 kilometers per hour, inertia wants to keep it going at the same speed in the same direction. Anything that is in the car including the driver and passengers has its own inertia which is separate from the car’s inertia. So the car accelerates riders to its speed.
If unfortunately the car should crash into a wall at the same speed of 50 kilometers an hour, your inertia and that of the car would evidently be independent of each other. The force of the wall would bring the car to a halt but your speed would remain the same.
Without the seatbelt, the driver would either slam into the steering wheel at 50 kilometers an hour or go flying through the windshield at the same speed. No matter what happens in a crash, something would have to exert force on you to slow you down.
A seatbelt applies the stopping force to more durable parts of the body reducing the chances of serious damage to your body. Put simply, the belt stops you from crashing at 50 kilometers an hour into the windscreen, the steering wheel and the wall
Now the nakuru shuttle driver might never read this but you have…BELT UP!
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