C.hello everyone! Still too many accidents on spring weekends, with too many bikers involved. A lot is written about it in the newspapers, also because the dynamics are often gruesome and unfortunately attract readers, and horror is added to horror until one gets the impression that the numbers of tragedies increase exponentially.
Fortunately this is not the case, the statistics confirm it, but of course it is a small consolation: the reality is that too many of us lose our lives on the roads. I was struck by the terrible stories like that of Cassago Brianza, where a 54-year-old motorcyclist died after losing control of his Harley, perhaps on a bump, and the motorcycle ended up killing a 19-year-old boy who was sitting with friends on the wall near the road. Or that of Dro, on the western Gardesana, where the parents of three young children, from Romagna they went to the Vasco concert, they ended up under a truck, no one knows how; or even that of Senigallia, with that 18-year-old boy who finally tried his first real bike and fell killing himself …
Speed, distraction, fatality, inexperience? Instinctively, I sometimes wonder if what appears to be a probable driving error – especially when no other vehicles seem to be involved – does not hide a whole other reality. I will be spoiled by the passion, but even if I am aware that everyone can run into a driving mistake (including myself), I see every day how superficially we get behind the wheel today. The use of the damn smartphone has spread like the plague, too many people float around fiddling with your device. And it’s not the motorcyclists who do it, the motorcyclists are the victims along with the cyclists and pedestrians.
Graziella Viviano, the mother of Elena Aubry victim of the holes in Rome, since 2018 she has been fighting for politics to take care of our lives, especially the life of young people; so far she has collected mostly disappointments but she is stubborn, does not give up, and now she appeals to the president of the Lazio region Zingaretti, asking incentives for the purchase of air bag jackets. It is a request that is perhaps too ambitious, expensive for the state budgets, but even rational if we consider the social costs deriving from the very high accident rates on Italian roads.
Times are not easy, but nothing has moved for years. Is it possible that you do not feel the urgency to intervene? This is what makes us indignant every time. There are the infrastructures to be put in order, the holes, the killer guardrails … And above all there is the bad education of those who put themselves on the road. We too have our responsibilities, we do not want to deny it, but it is a small thing in the general context. What do you expect to carry out a real campaign against the indiscriminate use of smartphones behind the wheel of cars, vans, heavy vehicles of all kinds? I am thinking of a vast and exemplary control operation throughout the national territory and a media awareness campaign. Nothing moves.
