Our roads, and our children, need lower speed limits

Until there is greater awareness of the toll posed by vehicle speeds on our children, more parents will find themselves experiencing their own Rabbit Hole nightmare, says Amy Aeron-Thomas
Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart
Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart in a scene from Rabbit Hole. Photograph: Jojo Whilden/AP

The sudden infant death plotline in EastEnders has generated much in the media recently about the handling of bereavement. A much more common death is that from a road crash.

Working with RoadPeace, the UK's national charity for road crash victims, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine recently estimated that the number of people alive in Britain who had experienced the death of a family member (child, partner, parent, sibling, grandparent or grandchild) at more than 500,000. One in 75 people alive in this country have been bereaved by a road crash.

Not all of them are parents and, thankfully, relatively few of these deaths involve an only child.

A new film, Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, provides a window on to the experience of parents who have lost their four-year-old only child, eight months on. And while the response to traumatic bereavement is highly personal and variable, the film conveys two key messages.

The first is the divisive devastation a sudden death has on a family. This will be familiar to those who have experienced the death of a child. To others, it will highlight the impacts on the so-called secondary casualties. Men and women grieve differently and often separately. There can be resentment towards "whole families", with some friends unable to even acknowledge the loss that others have to endure. Comparison with other deaths can be painful and inappropriate. And bereaved families make small steps, some not always forward, in an attempt to regain some of their pre-death life.

The second message of the film was unlikely to be intentional by the producers or author. But the pervasiveness of car-culture in the US runs throughout the film. Despite their son having been killed in a crash, the couple are shown to take risks with their own driving. The mother uses her mobile phone while driving (this is illegal in New York where the film is set, but not yet illegal in many other states), while the father drives after smoking cannabis. In the film, it is stressed how the parents do not blame the young driver, and even after he admits to the mother that he may have been speeding, she does not share that with her husband. While the parents agonise what they could have done to prevent the collision, they never question the need for a lower speed limit in their community.

The members of RoadPeace are keen to see lessons learned from tragedies, with this being the only possible "good" to come from their losses. In addition to providing emotional and practical support to victims, RoadPeace campaigns for improved investigations and greater priority given to reducing the level of danger tolerated on our roads. This has included calling for 15 years for a default 20mph speed limit for built-up areas. And progress has been mad, with the 20's Plenty for Us campaign group reporting almost 5 million people in Britain living in areas where 20mph speed limits for residential roads have been adopted.

The need for reduced speeds has only recently begun to be addressed in the US with Rod King, founder of the UK's 20's Plenty for Us, speaking at a summit on speed organised by Transportation Alternatives in New York City last November.


Amy Aeron-Thomas is the executive director of RoadPeace. Her four-year-old brother was killed in the US in a crash outside their home in 1965. That year, more than 50,000 Americans died on the roads. RoadPeace was one of the winners of the 2008 Guardian Charity Awards.