By Steven Logan

A friend who is annoyed about laws telling us what we can and cannot do asked me, "If the law limits us from driving faster than 130 kilometers per hour, why do we sell cars in this country that can reach speeds in excess of 200 kilometers per hour?" I shrugged my shoulders, tacitly agreeing with the inherent contradiction and then hazarded an explanation based on the heavy marketing of the automobile companies.

Speed sells. So, just having a car with the capability of traveling 220 kilometers per hour (136.4 miles per hour) is enough, regardless if one actually ever reaches that speed. It's all part of the myth of the open road and the freedom of going where and when you want — usually taking breathtaking bends at ungodly speeds along the way.

But the passionate acceptance of the myth of the open road gives way, in real life, to congestion, pedestrians and government regulation that get in the way of pure freedom.

With the latest Czech traffic law imposing stiffer fines on a number of offenses, primarily speeding, politics and myth are playing out on the road. In 2005, 481 people died in speeding-related collisions in the Czech Republic.

Within days of the new law's implementation, positive results were evident: In the first 11 days of July, there were 1,321 collisions fewer than in the same period last year and 29 fewer deaths.

Yet, there is anger about the law. According to a poll conducted for Czech Television, 60 percent of university-educated, mostly young people oppose it. They might be angry that, for example, a driver who goes 10 kilometers per hour over the speed limit can be fined up to 2,500 Kč ($111). Hefty indeed, but, according to the European Commission, reducing speed by only five kilometers per hour can reduce annual deaths in the European Union by more than 11,000.

Regardless of the legitimacy of these claims, it's more interesting to use the occasion of the new traffic law to publicly confront the obsessive entanglement of speed and automobiles in Czech culture. We all read and hear about how Czech drivers like to take risks and drive fast. But why?

Police Chief Vladislav Husák was caught driving 60 kilometers per hour over the speed limit days after the law took effect. The chief was one of the law's supporters. Husák gave up his license for three months (even though in a case like this the law calls for a minimum six-month suspension) and donated 10,000 Kč to charity. Michal ťas, head of traffic police in Frýdek-Místek, failed a Breathalyzer test after crashing his car. He also supported the law and has written a dissertation on ethical driving.

Quite an embarrassment for the chiefs, clearly. But they are not alone. Breaking the law at a time when the roads are under the most intense public scrutiny ever goes to show how deep this culture of speeding runs.

Under many communist regimes, the car was seen as a nasty symbol of the Western brand of privatized capitalism (in contrast to public transport and train travel, the legacies of which still proudly live on). This merely compounded the myth surrounding the automobile in North America and Western Europe. Thus, with the fall of communism, the car quickly became a super-status symbol of freedom as the powerless got access to horsepower.

As the car became an emblem of the revolution, speed and mobility became destinations in and of themselves, the ultimate realizations of progress, of moving toward something better. It is the citizen's right to speed, goes the thinking.

The unstoppable march of economic prosperity even brought the Hyundai plant to Nošovice, at the base of the Beskydy mountains, forcing people off their land and threatening a protected national park. As more cars are built in this country, still more people will see the automobile as a sign of success.

But the traffic law helps limit the power of assault that a fleet of cars speeding up and down Wenceslas Square represents. And the road tragedies that we popularly call "accidents" are by no means an accident; they are very much a part of the technology.

In most cases, it is the pedestrian scared into an inert state as she waits to cross a city street streaming with cars. The violence of speed strengthens the divide between the powerful and the powerless — those without the metal armor — and turns city streets into mere conduits for traffic.

Imposing stricter fines and reducing the city speed limits to 50 kilometers per hour — the norm in almost every European country — improves the mobility and the safety of everyone: pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers. Still, a Dutch study found that a collision with a vehicle going 50 kilometers per hour is fatal for 75 percent of pedestrians, whereas at 30 kilometers per hour this figure is 10 percent.

In Berlin, many of the city streets boast 30-kilometer-per-hour limits. In London, one transport group is pushing for 20-kilometer-per-hour speed limits on its neighborhood streets.

I am not wholly dismissing driving as inherently violent. But in most cases our obsession with the automobile and speed cannot be considered separately from the violence it brings — to say nothing of the environmental crises and the perversions of public space.

This is not to say that the new law will all of a sudden make us pause to think about this culture's seemingly relentless move toward squeezing bigger cars down the city's narrow streets. Rather, we should try to understand why this sometimes violent desire for speed exists in the first place.

The discussion I have initiated here is hoped to show how we have dangerously invested our hopes and dreams in the automobile, one of the most symbolically loaded objects of our time. And, in the meantime, we've polluted the landscape with speeding vehicles and noxious exhaust. Our culture is generally obsessed with arriving somewhere as fast as possible, without hindrance. This is a problem further compounded by the speed at which information passes through our computers and mobile phones. One is either speeding on the real highway or the virtual one at any given time.

ťas, the Frýdek-Místek police chief, told the authorities it really was not him driving but a mystery driver who, in shock, fled the scene. Interior Minister František Bublan, caught going 40 kilometers per hour over the speed limit on the Prague–Brno highway, said he was not paying attention to the speed at which his driver was motoring.

Under the new law with its high fines, it seems that some drivers, when caught speeding, will simply claim, "The car made me do it!"

Although the law may need honing, it is one that is long overdue. So let us applaud the end of a 15-plus-year assault by new car owners who perhaps felt it their democratic (or anti-communist) right to irresponsible, unbridled mobility.

This era has come to an end. The car has been knocked off its pedestal — and the streets will never be the same.