From ‘Gerard Ee rejects call for curbs on fast cars’, 15 May 2012, article by Ethan Lou, My Paper
MR GERARD Ee, chairman of the Public Transport Council, has rejected calls for tougher restrictions on high-performance sports cars following the fatal three-vehicle collision in Bugis involving a Ferrari.
Instead, he blamed reckless drivers and not fast cars. “Low-performance cars can also be going at 100kmh and beat the red light,” Mr Ee told my paper last night. In a post on citizen-journalism website Stomp yesterday, a netizen known as “Ban it” proposed that high-performance sports cars be banned on congested Singapore roads.
The netizen wrote: “As a small country, should we accommodate such high-performance cars on our increasingly packed roads?”
While most Singaporeans are reeling from the shocking video, others are hurling abuse at the dead PRC speedster. The reactions from Twitter are flushed with unanimous anger towards the departed, with insults like ‘bastard’ ,’Ferrari fucker’ and terms like ‘murder’ being tossed around. A case of flogging a dead horse perhaps, but anyone who has seen how the maniac smashed into the taxi with the relentless ferocity no Michael-Bay special effects could possibly match, killing two innocent people, would be tempted to think the Ferrari driver was asking for it. It adds an ironic twist to how someone once suggested that there should be a death penalty for speeding. Taxis seem to bear the brunt of sports car collisions; In April 2011 and July 2008, taxis collided with a Lamborghini and Mitsubishi Evo 9 respectively, the latter fatal for the taxi-driver involved.
The media is still milking the tragedy dry with the expected ‘mystery nightclub hostess’ angle, hoping to reap some scandalous, poetic justice out of a terrible situation for all families involved. Taking these monsters off the road won’t help matters, and nobody who could afford to drive a Ferrari would waste it by sticking to the speed limit. Like guns Ferraris don’t kill people, drivers do. Except that while most of us yield pistols, those who could afford it go for machine guns and missile launchers. This guy was freaking Rambo, and he bit the bullet hard.
It’s easy to associate Ferrari drivers with a certain ‘fast and furious’, decadently lavish, Type A lifestyle, though some loutish towkays who pick fights with random youths may own one too. In some tragic cases, the allure of the testosterone and adrenaline cocktail that comes with driving such cars prove too much for children of FATHERS who own them (Mazda MX-5) (Teens killed in horrific Sixth Ave car crash, 5 June 2008, ST). Still, most owners should be familiar with the temperament of their beasts and pay extra caution on the roads BECAUSE they are Ferraris, and because they’re expensive. Ma Chi could have been an experienced racer with hardly any incident during his racing streaks, no thanks to the bewildering generosity and ‘support’ from a wife who allowed her husband to sneak out with his toy in the wee hours to break the law, oblivious to how dangerous his addiction to speed is. Even the professionals on the circuit crash and burn, and maybe this isn’t really about drunkedness, the distraction of an attractive hostess/mistress, or whether PRCs can drive, but simply horrible luck; You can totally trash a sports car but still end up unhurt, while your passenger gets killed all because of you.
In 2010, Regan Lee lost control of a Mazda MX-5 during a test drive, and the car ‘flew over the road divider, smashed head-on into a black BMW, flipped over it and crashed down into a van in the other lane’ – an orgy of wanton destruction. You would have thought the guy would have been pulverised to bits, but he emerged unscathed. His female passenger, on the hand, was killed and all he got was a driving suspension. Maybe these guys were playing Stare and Drive, like what the folks from Fast and Furious do to impress girls.
Filed under: 2012, Foreign workers, Fun and games, Funerals/Death, Motorists, PRCs, Taxi drivers, Violence | Tagged: Foreign workers, Funerals/Death, Motorists, PRC, PRCs, Taxi drivers, Violence | 2 Comments »
