Speed kills, but racers don’t think it’ll be them

Yes, it stinks to be sitting in a traffic jam on the H-1 trying to get to work. Or the Pali. Or Kalanianaole. Or Farrington Highway along the Leeward coast.

But if there’s an upside to Oahu’s daily traffic horrors, it’s that when traffic is so backed up that nobody can move, that also means that it’s too jammed up for idiots to race.

Because once everybody goes home to eat dinner, take a bath and go to bed, stretches of Oahu’s roadways become Too Fast and Too Furious.

It is terrifying to be caught in the middle of the insanity, to be tootling home after working late or after potluck at a friend’s house and to suddenly have rockets with wheels blast past you so fast you feel the sound barrier break in your chest.

Even if you stay safely indoors once the sun goes down, you can lie in bed and hear the car engines screaming on the freeway a mile away like sound effects from a “Star Wars” battle scene. Sometimes you hear police sirens. Sometimes you hear a crash, and then a heavy silence, and then the fleet of emergency responders.

It’s easy to blame the “Fast and Furious” franchise, which makes street racing look like something that beautiful people do and would have you believe that only bad guys crash. Ditto for video games that give racers extra lives if they die. The drivers in real-life speed contests don’t seem to be racing each other so much as trying to chase death and score points.

But there were street racers long before those movies and way before video games. This has always been, though cars can go faster now.

What can be done?

There is already a law penalizing excessive speeding and racing with a fine of $500-$1,000, possible 30-day license suspension, 36 hours of community service and five days in jail for first-time offenders. A bill discussed in the Legislature this year would increase those penalties.

But if speeders don’t think they’re gonna die, they certainly don’t think they’ll get a ticket.

There’s all the usual advice: Get license plate numbers if you can, and call the police. If that’s your kid out there, go have the talk, even if your kid is over 21. If that’s your neighbor’s kid, cross the street and say something. Tell them you’re calling the cops, and then call the cops.

But then there’s the other stuff. The tired-already stuff. The damn-kids-never-listen stuff. The what-the-hell-you-gonna-do stuff. That stuff is simply this: When it gets dark, stay off the roads so you don’t get killed. Wash your lettuce thoroughly for fear of slugs, don’t eat lead paint chips off the walls of your old house, but if you really want to be safe, stay off the road. According to HPD, excessive speed is a factor in more than half of Oahu’s traffic fatalities.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.