Good for you PEST, did they give you a pat on the head too. If they did, it obviously wasn't hard enough.

I can't believe anyone could not detect my tongue so far out into my cheek, that I was almost biting it off in that post.

Mate you should grease your backside, & try to slip off into the next world, you're far too serious for this one. Seriously misguided too, it would seem. Do you live all your life by Charlies guide lines?

<< …it costs the State more to prosecute the offender than the State can hope to recover by way of fines. And it is the unwritten policy of all State and Territory governments that traffic policing is a profit centre, not a cost centre. >>

Well isn’t that a huge indictment of the whole road-safety regulation regime, if it is true, grputland!

My feeling is that there is some validity in what you say but that it is not a major reason as to why the police effectively discourage community policing, the recording of evidence, and even the making of any complaints at all about dangerous antics on our roads unless an accident has actually happened or damage has been incurred.

I think it comes down to plain old slackarseness, quite frankly!!

I sense that the cops want a bit of variety in their job and don’t want to pursue boring old road safety complaints! They seem to be willing to pursue complaints about any other little thing, regardless of the triviality or lack of prosects of getting a conviction.

I can give you couple of personal examples if you like.

Power steering has made telling a car where you want to go a whole lot easier, especially for the weaker sex.
How often do you see a car crossing into the other lane when a car goes around a corner. or cars cutting corners. Is this to do with faults in the cars we drive, or is it lazy driving.
Car parks are just another place to drive as hard as you can go.
I am all in favor of speed cams; and there should be many more of them.
Those who flaut the law, will make sure speed cams; are around for a long time to come.
Number plate recognition is the best innovation thats been around for a long time. Unpaid fines of 30 & 40 thousand $ being found.
When we come to the conclusion that speeding drivers are driving the push for more and more speed cams, we will be beginning to see the light.

Thanks for that 509 speeding drivers do create the demand more speed cameras. However please note that lower sped limits are the way to go.

If only VicRoads, NSW RTA had  sent their engineers to the Netherlands 20 years ago to see the many options for using rail line and road reserves, access paths along canal and rivers,and parks, to create continuous bikeways. If only they had ridden bicycles along residential streets which have a 30 Km/Hour speed limit and  bike lanes on roads with a mandatory 50 Km/Hr speed limit . They also would have made small land acquisitions to create short cuts in the residential street network to link up other bicycle routes. They
would have seen Freeways which are designed to integrated with the national bikeway network. Indeed, Freeway and major road bridges separate bikeways and walkways.

Yes it can be done. Been there and for a month documented it from the saddle with hundreds of photos and interviews with Dutch planners in 12 cities. I also the way the Dutch police had brought the speedsters Into line and their great care they take in monitoring child cyclists behaviour.

Think about it when  medical researchers find better ways of keeping people alive they learn from other countries by going there to see and study . What do Australian road engineers do, they sit on their buts  and fail to learn about world best practice driving motor vehicles . What a pleasure it would have been for VicRoads engineers to experience world best practice by ride bikes in the netherlands in an around their delightful city’s. And at night enjoying themselves by drinking the many boutique Dutch and Belgium beers in car free the city squares surrounded by ancient buildings. My advocacy efforts shown below make the above very clear : 

&#149;Parker, Alan A (2001). “Making Walking and Cycling Safer: Lessons for Australia from the Netherlands Experience”, 24th Australian Transport Research Forum.

Some problems with speed cameras:

1. The authorities won’t tell us exactly what speed they are policing, which is utterly disgusting, given that the cruising speed is very close to the speed limit, often actually slightly above the official speed limit on the highways, which means your room to move between rolling with the flow and getting booked is tiny!

2. The penalties are too big! Surely we should have more of a sliding scale, so that if you fall just over the bookable limit, you don’t get clobbered with a huge fine.

3. Normal drivers, who just slip over the limit, make up the majority of captors. Idiots who substantially speed are in the tiny minority.

4. No account is paid to how much a person drives, how many speed cameras they pass with no problem, how safely you were driving for the road and the conditions at the time you were stung, how familiar or otherwise you might be with the particular road or region or how good your past record is. If you get caught out, you are deemed to be a very bad person, end of story.

5. This whole setup thus works strongly to alienate average drivers.

6. The policing of speed is so damn haphazard. Many areas have terribly inadequate speed limit signage. Surely, if we are going to be stung with big fines and demerit points, then we need a vastly improved level of signage, so that people are less likely to accidentally speed because they think they are in a different speed zone than what they are.

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7. Speed camera address only one aspect of road safety. They do nothing to prevent tailgating, dangerous overtaking, and other belligerent driving, which you often incur if you travel even slightly under the accepted cruising speed. There is NOT a holistic approach to the policing of road safety.

8. While speed cameras are useful safety mechanisms, they are also lucrative revenue-raising devices. This biases their usage enormously. There is a strong revenue-generating motivation for lucrative cameras to be left alone. But if a camera is pinging lots of people, it is surely a big indication that the speed limit is inappropriate or not sufficiently well signed at that particular site, and should be adjusted accordingly.

9. Meanwhile, when you sit on the speed limit on the open road, you still get subjected to speeders coming up rapidly behind and then sitting far too close. And we can’t do anything about it, because the police are not receptive to complaints of this sort. The public is thus rendered impotent in assisting with road-safety policing.

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