Studies may have shown that driver education programs have not reduced the road toll but this is probably more indicative that the training needs to be changed rather than throwing away the entire concept.

I can't believe that training will not improve drivers' skills and attitudes. There is not a single human activity where training does not improve peoples' abilities; be it sport, job training, education etc.

If there is a flaw with driver training it is that not enough time is spent. Skills such as emergency braking take months to developed to the point where they are instictive. A course of only one or two days, once every ten years or so, is not going to be sufficient.

There's an old and very true saying - "you can't put old heads on young shoulders" - and herein lies most of the problem. I've been driving since 1955, with very few accident, and no injury to myself or others. True I did some stupid things when I first started, but I woke up quickly that I was heading for trouble and was lucky not to have come to grief.

The young drivers today [male -mostly - and female] drive as if they were in a race, too fast, tailgating and cutting others off. Racing is for professionals, on proper tracks. Stunts are for professional expert stunt driveers, not over-confident, probably half-drunk idiots. Others, maybe the same ones! do stupid burn-outs at T intersections and then fishtail across the white line, and heaven help anyone coming the other way. I have dobbed one of them in, and will do so until he's taught a lesson before he kills someone.

Another thing is loud music. I have tested myself with this, and I found that I lost touch with reality, it was as though I really wasn't on the road, but watching a video, so I quickly turned it down. Also, you can't hear sirens or crossing bells, horns etc. Drivers have got to realise that they and their passengers are not indestructible, nor are others on the road. Imagine how it would feel to have to tell someone's family that they were dead or maimed for life because of your stupidity!! Because you couldn't resist that rush of blood, that adrenalin rush! Driving decisions and life decisions take DISCIPLINE and that's lacking in today's education and upbringing. It's tough finding this out the hard way - in an ambulance or a Casualty Ward. Come to think of it, a compulsory visit to one of these Wards would be a wake up call before that Licence were issued. One of my daughters did a Defensive Driving Course and it helped her a lot. I think extra training is part of the solution, together with a change of attitude and psychological tests.

Yes, psychological tests. Some drive like maniacs, not seeming to care about the consequences. This might weed out some, and impress on the others the seriousness of what driving means, before they find out the hard way, in that Casualty Ward. There should be ZERO alcohol tolerance for P platers, and no passengers with driving lessons on L plates. Passengers often egg drivers on, or otherwise distract them. This brings me to one last thing and it it vitally important. CONCENTRATE ON THE TRAFFIC AND ROAD CONDITIONS AROUND YOU. Don't be distracted by passengers, radio, changing CD's etc. CONCENTRATE AND DON'T HAVE TO MAKE THAT SAD TRIP TO CASUALTY.

I forgot to mention above, that there should be zero tolerance for drugs as well as booze for P platers.
Also mobile phones are a menace, dividing concentration and causing one-hand driving. Text messages have made them even more dangerous. There's another old saying "two hands for beginners" and that applies to cars as well as pushbikes.
Experience is a great teacher[ [maybe the best], so young drivers would do well to benefit from the experience of those who have been on the road for years. It could save them a lot of grief.
TV and movie commercials by car manufacturers are no help either, trying to show how fast their cars go, even around tight turns. Ordinary drivers, particularly inexperienced ones can get themselves in lot of trouble trying to be Michael Schumacher or Craig Lowndes. They might feel like they're "King of the Road" but there's "no such critter" and only fools who don't deserve a Licence, will try to be. Finally, if you'll "pardon my French" DON'T BE A SMART-ARSE !

Here, here Big Al! I am a mother of 2 young children and have seen first hand the ramifications of drink driving and as you put it, being a "smart arse". I believe that driver education would benefit everyone and hope that it becomes compulsory for P-platers.

The author must be even more disappointed than I that there has been so little response to this article. Have people given up on trying to save lives on the road?

So many of the casualties are or most precious resource - our young people - that we must keep on trying to save them from themselves, or maybe a stupid friend trying to show what a great driver, King of The Road he is! Magistrates and Judges are to blame in many ways by being too soft. When ARE they going to wake up?

I'm sorry if I seem to be monopolising this site, but one of the columnists in the Melbourne Herald/Sun [Kerry Cue] referred to some odd small items she had seen during 2004. One of them concerned a young man in England with a very powerful stereo [I think she said it was 1,000 watt] and the constant thump thump caused his lungs to collapse.

I can't verify it but maybe someone else has heard of it. That thump does seem to hit you in the chest.Incidentally, I very nearly got cleaned up by two idiots racing on the Melbourne Ring Road afew days ago. If they had hit me from behind you wouldn't be reading this post. I reckon they were doing at least 140k.

Have a SAFE and Happy 2005

Well, here I go again, responding to a dead line of comment. But then you never know. Just might get a bight.

I agree with Ellyeti; “I can't believe that training will not improve drivers' skills and attitudes.”

If the training is right, then the desired result will be there, at least to a fair extent. Besides, how stupid are we to allow young drivers to get behind the wheel before they have had more than adequate training, and testing? It should simply be unthinkable.

It is evident every day on the roads that people don’t know the road rules, don’t know or care about safety margins and risk factors, and generally drive far less safely than they should be, often without even realising it – because they have never been adequately trained.

Exhaustive training is in order. It should be almost as hard to get a driver’s licence as it is to get a pilot’s licence. And those who have a licence without that training should be required to take it within 12 months, or forfeit their licence. Then every driver should be required to do a refresher course every five years.

Various other things need to go hand in hand with comprehensive training, such as a vastly improved policing effort, a realistic mechanism for ordinary citizens to do something about dangerous and stupid drivers, and a meaningful penalty system that is really going to deter idiots. How about displaying the faces and names of people caught for speeding and other dangerous and unlawful driving on the television within the local 6pm news and in the local newspaper, so that the embarrassment or shame factor becomes a real deterrent, along with a hefty fine and accrual of demerit points.

We have never collectively got serious about this whole issue. It completely beats me as to why not.

O well said Ludwig

But training, no matter how comprehensive, including graphic demonstrations of the consequences of driving unsafely, is only going to go so far for as long as the policing regime is pathetic.

The traffic branch is considered to be about the lowest rung on the police ladder. It has steadily declined in terms of officers and funding per citizen, at least in Queensland. Traffic cops police about 1% of traffic laws, concentrating on speeding, drink-driving and very little else. And even with these, the effort is not much more than token, and pretty obviously oriented towards revenue-raising a lot of the time. Aggressive tailgaters, dangerous overtakers and generally impatient drivers just simply get away with it, end of story.

Queensland has just got a fleet of bright red police cars. The idea is for the police to be more conspicuous and hence have a greater impact on slowing drivers down and reducing other misdemeanours on our roads. Well I reckon that is entirely the wrong approach. ALL police vehicles should be unmarked, but equipped with a siren and flashing blue light that identifies them as police immediately and unambiguously when needed. If police cars were unmarked, then in the minds of drivers every reasonably new car across a wide range of models could be a potential police vehicle. Surely this would be much more effective in mitigating mongrel driving behaviour

Ludwig you’re a veritable genius. Why didn’t I think of that. Hold on… I did!

Another thing that would really boost safety is a community policing program. That is; facilitating and encouraging the general public to report dangerous, risky, or illegal driving, instead of effectively discouraging it, if not outrightly preventing it.

We are supposed to be able to report anything illegal to the police and expect them to act on it. Well, what a joke. I have tested this with a series of reports on dangerous driving, made over a period of four or five years. A number of police have told me that I can and should do this, but when it comes to actually physically doing it over the counter at the police station, I have been told things ranging from one end of the spectrum to the other, ie from ‘yes, we will very keenly pursue your complaint and let you know what happens’, to ‘no not interested, we don’t have the resources to pursue minor complaints that have no chance of being proven’. I never heard back about any of those complaints. My conclusion is that it is absolutely useless going to the police unless there has actually been an accident.

If only the general public was informed about how to best record evidence and report dangerous driving, so that any member of the public could potentially be a policer of the law or a community police officer (compo), and so that it would be easy for official police officers to pursue, then we could really strike at the core of our road safety problems.

Ludwig

You’ve made… um… I’ve made. ..some criticisms about the policing of road safety. So I just want to clarify that I am not being specifically critical of the police on the ground. There are problems at all levels, and I think the blame need to be spread around: the Federal and State governments, police ministers, police chiefs and police officers all deserve some criticism, generally speaking, along with the general public who don’t lobby hard enough on these issues, and who tend to give the police a harder time than they may deserve. But within that, there are lots of people in all or most of the abovementioned categories, who are striving for real improvements.

Dear Ludwig – the thing that gets to me above all else about road safety is that as a private citizen, you are just powerless to do anything about unsafe driving.
I witness bad driving behaviour and get subjected to it almost every time I get out there on the road. I have been a frequent user of the Bruce Hwy in north and central Queensland for years, but now I take alternative routes as much as possible. The reason is that I get subjected to speeding, tailgating and dangerous overtaking at great frequency, on every trip, and there is just simply nothing that I can do about it, short of staying off that road. Even when I sit on 108 in the 100k zone, I still get a steady stream of vehicles coming up behind, following too closely and often overtaking in unsafe circumstances. It’s maddening! And there are always police vehicles cruising up and down that road! The same thing happens to a lesser extent around town.

A lot of drivers don’t even realise that they are doing anything wrong when following at two or three car-lengths behind you at 100k.
The RACQ, police and Dept of Transport all suggest that the minimum safe following distance at 100km/h is ten car lengths, 8 car lengths at 80, 6 at 60, etc… under ideal conditions. A lot do realise that it is risky, but know that they will never be pulled over for it.

So the issue is three-fold – a lack of adequate training, a lack of policing, and the thing really riles me – a complete inability for any non-police person to do a goddamn thing about it. You can flash your tail-lights or throw your hand out the window to wave them back, blast your horn as they pass, flash your headlights after they have passed, yell abuse, wave them over, etc, all of which achieves nothing, and you just cannot go to the police and expect them to act on a complaint of speeding, dangerous tailgating or overtaking

Ludwig you drongo, you left out one very important point. Add to your second paragraph above – And very few people know that it is illegal, because they don’t know the law, because they have not received adequate training.

Good point Ludwig. You are right, I’m a drongo.

This is one very significant consequence of inadequate training – drivers not knowing the bloody rules of the road!

It also raises another very interesting point – many police officers don’t know them either!! I have struck this a number of times when asking police for advice on various road-safety matters. Many don’t seem to know the law any better than the average driver – and that is to just a terribly inadequate extent.

So it is not only drivers who need better training.

Upon asking a police officer what one should do when being chronically tailgated by a large truck on the highway while sitting on or just above the speed limit (a regular occurrence on the Bruce Hwy), I was told emphatically that it is ok to speed up until you feel that you have alleviated the risk factor by leaving the truck behind at a safe distance. This was emphatically supported by a second officer. Subsequent inquiries proved this to be a total crock of poo. I was later told that there is no way that you would get off if you were caught speeding under such circumstances.

There is another whole dismal scenario here – if the police don’t know the road rules particularly well, then what is the point of sticking to the law with respect to laws that don’t get policed? The whole business just gets worse and worse, the deeper you dig into it.

Ludwig, just between you, me and the gatepost, I absolutely detest the way speed is policed. Who gave the cops (in Queensland at least) the right to police the speed limit at 10kmh over the stated limit? I would really like to know who has this discretionary power, in relation to something that is written in absolutely black and white terms in law, and is absolutely black and white to every driver by way of speed limit signs, 50kmh urban zones where unsigned and 100kmh open road zones where unsigned. The error margin in speed-measuring equipment is much less than 10 kmh, so that can’t be used as an excuse.

It is patently obvious on the Bruce Hwy that this 10kmh extra speed applies. The cruising speed for the vast majority of vehicles is close to 110 in the 100k zones, and police cars cruise that road constantly, allowing them to do so. In effect, the police have trained the public to abuse the law by 10kmh.

But of course, the police will never admit to this publicly, although it has been admitted to me privately. If this 10kmh buffer is going to apply, for whatever reason, then why on earth can’t the police announce it publicly? How can they justify not telling the public exactly where we stand with this business? Again last week, for about the tenth time, I heard the direct question asked of a police officer on ABC radio. He would not say by how much we can exceed the limit and get away with it. He simply said that there is some leeway. Well, that is just not good enough. The public have every right to know exactly what the go is.

Continued next post

From previous post

A 10kmh leniency obviously also applies in 50 and 60k zones in ‘wahooland’ (the name of my home town, which will remain undivulged). But you can bet your bottom dollar that 40kmh school zones are policed a lot more tightly (when they are policed at all). So some poor mother having just dropped off her child, who has come to understand that it is totally acceptable to do 60 in a 50k zone, does 44 in a 40k school zone and gets busted for it.

I understand that any police officer can charge a driver for doing 101kmh in a 100k zone if they so choose. And for that matter they can turn a blind eye to someone doing 130. So this opens up another can of worms; the police have enormous discretionary powers, which can be and certainly are at times abused. I have experienced this from both the positive and negative side. This discretionary business leaves the way open for people to be victimised, for locals to be let off whereas out-of-towners cop it, for young males to be harangued while females get off, etc.

There is another horrible aspect to the way speed is policed. But stuff it, I’ve had enough whingeing for one night. I’m going to bed.

Ludig, it's great that you are concerned with the carnage on our roads. Too few are, especially those stupid Magistrates and Judges who say what a terrible thing the offnder has done, and then give him/her a slap on the wrist and turn them loose again to possibly kill and main again and ruin more lives.

I hope some of those legal eagles are reading these comments, they might just get some wisdom! We need better driver education [defensive driving courses] video's of accident victims shown to offenders. and more notice taken of dobbing in idiots. And Magistrates and Judges who will act to PROTECT THE PUBLIC instead of fall over themselves to be fair to drunks and idiots who think they can drive like Craig Lowndes.

Hello Big Al. It is nice to know that someone out there is reading my rantings. Yes, too few people are concerned about road safety, which I find mind-boggling, given the consequences of bad driving, and given the heartache felt by so many people as the result of death or injury. It just completely doesn’t make sense to me.

So many aspects of it could be improved relatively easily. Why are we as a society apparently resigned to such a high risk level on our roads??

Totally agree with your comments. Cheers

Ludwig, I’m dying with anticipation to know what the other “horrible aspect to the way speed is policed” is. Pleeease tell us!

O gee, just when I was going to pull my woolly head in, someone wants me to continue. How nice.

The other horrible aspect to the policing of speed is……. the incredible inadequacy of speed limit signage!

‘What!’ you say? Well, how often do you find yourself not knowing what speed zone you are in? Around the area that you are familiar with, maybe not much at all, but in unfamiliar areas; a damn lot! How often do you assume a speed limit or just roll with the flow of the traffic without actually knowing the limit? How often do you find you cannot recall what the last speed sign was? How often do you turn into a road and not see a speed sign for a considerable distance?

The fact is, speed limits are extremely inadequately displayed in most places. This creates a number of problems.

Firstly, it is all too easy to assume the wrong speed limit and wind up getting busted for doing 25kmh over the limit. If you assume it is 80kmh and you do 88, (which is acceptable to the general public and police alike, as explained in an earlier post) and the limit turns out to be 60, then you could be dealt quite serious blow in terms of a hefty fine and demerit points – considerably more than if you exceeded the limit by less than 15kmh. In Queensland at least, speed limits often jump by 20kmh rather than 10, especially from 60 to 80 to 100.

More next prattle

From previous prattle

Secondly, it creates a schism between those who know the area and the speed limits and those who don’t and have to take it very carefully until they encounter a speed sign. Basically, if you don’t know the speed limit, you need to err or the side of caution and that means doing 10 or 20kmh lower than you think the speed limit probably is. And if you do that, you often incur the wrath of other drivers, with consequent tailgating and other impatient and offensive behaviour.

But the police tell us that it is totally the responsibility of the driver to know what the speed limit is, end of story. Not knowing is not a defence that will stand up in the face of a police officer who has pulled you over to book you. And police have a tendency to operate in areas where there is a lack of adequate signage and a consequent high frequency of drivers who wrongly assume a higher speed zone.

So why aren’t speed zones adequately signed?? I am completely stuffed if I know! Some small coastal communities in central Queensland have speed limits painted on the roads. Tenterfield and probably many other NSW towns have speed limits painted on suburban roads just past very corner. THIS is what we need! We need know what the speed limit is straight away each and every time we turn a corner into a new road. And we need to be reminded on the same road, very regularly

There is an awful duplicity inherent in the policing of speed. It is multifaceted;

Firstly, as explained above, there is often a schism between those who know an area and hence know the speed limit, and those who don’t. So the next time you see interstate grey nomads Ma and Pa Kettle pottering along at 40 in a 60k zone, it may just be that they are not being road-hogs but that they are driving slowly because they have not yet encountered a speed limit sign on that particular road, and they are new to the area.

Secondly, there are two rules; one for the vast majority of us, which says that we can do a few kmh over the stated limit and not risk being harangued by the cops or anyone else, and one for those who either take a principled stance or just don’t trust the police and stay under the stated limit at all times, usually 5 to 10 k’s under. The difference in all situations is up to 20kmh. If you have experienced a vehicle in front of you doing 20kmh less than you want to do, or if you have a vehicle behind you right up your arse, pushing you to go get a move on, you’ll know what I mean. Every driver has experienced both.

Thirdly, the degree of leniency shown by the cops is not constant. In Queensland it seems to be pretty uniformly 10kmh over…. except in 40k school zones and apparently sometimes in 110k zones.

Fourthly, the powers of discretion that police have as to whether to book someone or turn a blind eye and as to what margin of leniency they are going to observe, are a real worry. They do get abused, but even if they didn’t, there would still be a strong belief in the community that they do.

This duplicity breeds impatience, aggressive and intimidating driving, road-rage and other offensive and dangerous behaviour. It is not the only cause of these things, but I reckon it is a major contributor.

Crikey, I haven’t had a whinge for a few days.

As if the incredible paucity of speed signs wasn’t bad enough for those who desire to keep to the speed limit all the time (or within 10k’s over), there is yet another whole miserable aspect to the saga – you just have to monitor your speedo every few second to make sure your speed is hasn’t crept up over the limit!

When you are driving around town or on the highway and you want to roll with the flow, which is basically almost as fast as you can get away with, you literally have to monitor your speed at least every five seconds! Of course your speed is going to occasionally creep over your desired level.

I experimented with this for about a year. I tried as hard as I could to keep my speed from not exceeding 10k’s over. Every time it did, I would pull over and wait for ten seconds, then the second time in the same trip, for twenty seconds, etc. But no matter how much of this self-inflicted education, or punishment, I just could not prevent my speed from creeping over the limit every so often.

Most of the time you have a very small speed margin in which to stay. That is, between the cruising speed and the effectively illegal speed.

Cruise control is good on the highway, but not around town. As soon as you touch the brake it turns off. So you have to concentrate on whether it is still functioning or not. And it has the downside of making you reluctant to touch the brake until you really need to. If you can set so that it doesn’t turn off when you touch the brakes, then you have to make sure you reset it every time you change speed zones. And of course only a very small fraction of drivers have this facility.

I don’t know the answer, but it is one of the truly maddening aspects to driving.

So why am I so concerned about road safety, to a point way beyond anyone else it seems? Is it some reaction to being stung by the cops once too often? Is it a result of a death of a loved-one or an otherwise bad accident?

No.

It is a result of the realisation that there are so many real risks out there on the roads and that so many drivers are simply a million miles short of satisfactory, and that very few drivers have a good awareness of and skills in dealing with the many risk factors. It is also a realisation that the whole deal with road safety is terribly badly dealt with and could so easily be greatly improved. And extending from that, it is the realisation that we as a society have basically just come to live with the road carnage, which is totally unacceptable to me.

My passions of botany and geology have taken me across the country and off into the wilds at a very regular rate for many years. I have always done a lot of open-road driving, and around-town driving. My job regularly takes me all over north and central Queensland.

I went for about 24 years without accruing a demerit point, all the time being a prolific driver. This is the result of two things - being a cautious safety-conscious driver and there just not being anywhere enough policing effort on our roads. I could have been booked innumerable times, especially in the early years. So the second factor is very significant.

When eventually that record was broken, it was because I missed a speed sign, and was busted for doing 72 in a 60k zone, when I thought I was in an 80k zone.

So that’ll lead me into my next posting – about how an exemplary driving record meant absolutely nothing to the cops when I questioned that ticket

So I was booked for doing 12 kmh over the limit. The police didn’t book anyone at the time (2000) unless they were doing at least 11kmh over, and still don’t in Queensland as far as I know. This effectively means that the police have trained drivers to treat the speed limit as 10k’s over what the signs say. So I was effectively booked for doing 2k’s over. It was an absolute bottom-of-the-barrel infringement.

I wanted to preserve my exemplary driving record of more than 20 years standing, so I wrote to the district police superintendent pointing out the nature of the offence and my record, which I presumed he could very easily confirm.

I received back an ugly form letter saying that speed will not be tolerated and that no further correspondence will be entered into. There was no indication that my record had been checked, nor that it meant anything whatsoever anyway. Do you think that has blighted my impression of that Innisfail superintendent, that local constabulary, and the traffic branch of the Qld police in general? Bloody oath it has.. and very powerfully so.

When I lived in WA many years ago, there was a lot of discussion on a reward scheme for drivers who went for ten years without the loss of a demerit point. I don’t know what happened with it, but it was a good idea.

Basically, we need a carrot and stick approach to road safety, not just a bloody big stick! Let alone a bloody big stick that whacks a few people now and then for a small set of misdemeanours while missing the vast majority of offenders regarding the same misdemeanours, and failing miserably to whack anyone who infringes the law outside of that small number of driving offences.

It seems to me that the overall level of policing of road safety is dismal. I see cops working speed fairly often, both from mobile and stationary units. But I haven’t been pulled over for a random breath test in years, during which time I have driven long distances in every state and territory. I used to get pulled over regularly for RBTs. My driving patterns haven’t changed, so I assume the overall policing effort has been very considerably reduced.

Yesterday I was stopped for a licence check. This happened in Strahan, Tasmania. That’s only the second time in 30 years of driving that that has happened. The police were set up to stop all or most passing vehicles on a small side road with a very low traffic volume, just off the main highway. They were doing nothing other than licence checks. It seemed like a clear-cut token effort to me: a case of being seen to be doing something (clearly visible from the highway) with the minimum amount of effort.

Well, its that silly time of the year again, and we hear the same old message; the police will be out in force so if you’re a bloody idiot you will get caught. Yeah right. If you’re a bloody idiot, you have about 0.02% chance of getting caught instead of 0.01.

I have come across the most extraordinary phenomenon while driving around Tassie. About half of all vehicles cross the centre line on right-hand blind curves!

The natural tendency is to approach the centre of the road on right-hand curves and the edge of the road on left-hand curves. But I would also have thought that the natural tendency was to stay on the left side of the road, especially when you can only see a few metres of the road in front of you. But it obviously isn’t so!

Tasmania is full of hilly winding roads with sharp curves, but despite excellent line-marking on all main roads, with double solid white lines on all blind curves, an extraordinarily high proportion of vehicles cross the lines, some of them terribly so. Even if it just one vehicle in a hundred did this, or one in a thousand, it would still be a high enough frequency to be a real worry.

I put it down to most people just really not having anywhere near enough natural nous to be good drivers, or good enough drivers for that matter. This is where training comes in… and I again state my disagreement with the notion put forth in the article that initiated this line of discussion; that training is ineffectual.

Hey Ludwig, what do you think of 50kmh urban limits?

O Ludwig, you have hit another raw nerve.

I think the 50kmh urban limit is a mongrel introduction. We now have a standard 50k urban limit in ?every state, unless otherwise signed.

I hate it because;

1. It complicates the whole deal terribly. Instead of the vast majority of streets being 60, we now have an admixture of 50 and 60k streets, with most main roads being 60. Trouble is, there are nowhere near enough speed limit signs for you to be able to know what the limit is half the time, especially if you are not well and truly familiar with the area. This creates real problems, as I have outlined in a previous posting on this thread.

2. It wouldn’t have been necessary if our esteemed authorities had started policing speed limits at or very close to their face value. In just about every situation, a 50kmh speed limit sign effectively means a 60kmh limit, because the police seem to always operate with a 10k buffer, also as previously explained.

3. It has been terribly abused in some places, with 50k zones starting on main roads well out of town, for example.

I just wish that the pollies, police, RACQ and all other interested parties had come up with a better idea. One much better idea would have been to start policing speed limits at face value and putting the onus on drivers to make sure they stayed under the speed stated on the relevant speed limit signs. In conjunction with this, many many many more speed signs would be needed so that there would be no doubt about what speed zone you were in at any given point. Most of these, as I have previously suggested, should be painted on the road, just past every corner. Afterall, a very large number of new speed signs were needed when the 60 to 50 change was implemented. I reckon the number of these signs in my town tripled in preparation for this

Let’s see, what can I whinge about next? How about tailgating? Yep, that’ll do. Yeah alright, I have touched on it before on this thread, but who cares. Besides, there are only two people reading this stuff; Ludwig and his arch enemy… um… Ludwig.

When driving on the open road and to a lesser extent on urban streets, a frequent frustration is having some mongrel following too closely. You just can’t escape it and there is just no way of adequately dealing with it. It never used to bother me, back when I was a naïve driver, ignorant of safety margins and risk factors. But for the last few years it has really bugged me shirtless.

Why do I get perturbed? Because tailgating is 1. an obvious reduction in one significant safety margin – the distance between vehicles and thus the reaction time of the following driver if the first vehicle needs to stop or even slow down quickly, thus increasing the risk of an accident, most likely by way of the car behind running into you, but also because your concentration is disrupted. 2. undertaken by those who don’t have a rooting clue or care about the added risk that they are placing you and themselves under, and who are not prepared to stop quickly in the event of you having to hit the brakes. 3. a demonstration of impatience, aggression, outright offensive driving, incompetent driving and ineligibility to hold a driver's licence.

So what do you do about it? Well you can speed up or you can pull over. But if you are sitting above, on or near the speed limit, why should you? You can flash your brakelights, or stick your arm out the window and wave them back, which actually works sometimes, but mostly doesn’t. You can slow down until your speed is appropriate for the imposed risk factor. Or you can ignore them and just remain under that heightened risk for as long as they are behind you.

Advice from police, RACQ and Dept of Transport is that you should do the last, or slow down if you really feel unsafe and pull over if necessary. But continuing to drive at around about the speed limit, a bit above or below with a mongrel driver implanted up your backside, is just completely not on. It is appalling advice that you should just tolerate that sort of thing.

Of course you should slow down if you feel threatened. But you can’t if you have more than one vehicle behind you, without inconveniencing innocent drivers, increasing tensions and thus risks, let alone incurring the wrath of all those behind (none of whom will point the finger at the mongrel tailgater). And you can’t do it, because the idiot behind, who has already demonstrated intolerance for your presence, is only going to get angrier and crawl right up your arse if you slow down on him/her/it.

And what makes it so much worse is that the @#$#$%^ police do absolutely nothing about it, and yet they must witness it all the time. They could very easily launch a publicity campaign and start booking people for it. Tailgating, or aggressive and impatient driving per se, is one of the major problems with road safety, which manifests itself in road-rage incidents and who knows how many accidents. The greatest cause of motor vehicle insurance claims is nose-to-tail accidents, and the vast majority of them are caused by drivers following too closely and/or not being sufficiently aware of the risk factors involved with leaving an insufficient safety margin between their vehicle and the one in front and not being sufficiently prepared to stop quickly.

Again, what do the police do about it? Zilch.

You are right Ludwig ol’ mate. Tailgating is a real bastard of a thing to deal with when driving. You are not just being nitpicky over some insignificant aspect of road safety, as one of your friends suggests.

Not only is the magnitude of the tailgating issue evident by way of its close association with the most frequent types of motor vehicle insurance claims and hence accidents, as you point out, but it was also the clear number one complaint of drivers in Queensland in two separate polls undertaken by the RACQ a few years apart. Think of all the annoyances you face when driving – and there are many – and tailgating came out as the worst.

So then, why on the planet don’t the police deal with it?? They could so easily add it to their publicity campaigns, and they could just as easily book people for it as they can for speeding

The relationship between police and magistrates is another area that deserves harsh comment.

I have had very limited experience, having only gone go court once over a traffic matter, which I chose to do following a totally ridiculous charge. But that one instance was enough to stain my respect for the law and police very deeply and irreversibly. (No it wasn’t the trigger for my road-safety comments. My comments started a many years earlier, including many letters to the editor in my local paper.)

Everyone; the police, legal system, RACQ, government, etc, say that you have to be proven guilty or at least deemed guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in order to be convicted. Well, in my experience, this is patently not the case.

It seemed to me that the magistrate was determined to hold solidarity with the police officer, virtually no matter what. Now I realise that that’s a hell of an allegation….. but it is the straightforward truth.

Even though this happened more than four years ago, I am about to take forward official complaints, because the effect that it has had on me has been severe, and has not lessened with time.

The ONLY thing I did was to slow down in front of a chronic tailgater, and keep my speed slow and uniform until he could pass, end of story. For that I was charged with failing to show due care to other road users, by an officer who clearly had no concept of the danger or illegality inherent in tailgaiting, let alone very deliberately aggressive and dangerous tailgating.

So what do you do when one of the most fundamental points of decency and law gets shown to be an out and out fallacy? Yes I’m referring to the notion that you are innocent until proven guilty, and that you have to be proven guilty or at least shown to be guilty beyond all reasonable doubt before you can be convicted.

You flop around in a state of shock and bewilderment for four years, and then you launch into tough action. Maybe. One thing is for sure, if you believe in justice and you are concerned about things such as social coherence and aspects of it such as our appalling road carnage, then you don’t just let it be. I have tried to live with it for four years, but I can’t. Of course I can’t. So whatever action I can take will be taken.

This particular police officer did a few things not befitting his position, which amounted to very different treatment of myself and the other party, both of who went to the police station of our own volition to complain about each other’s driving. But upon making a complaint about this officer after the court case, which I did in line with my legal advice, nothing happened. It went nowhere.

So I take it that the police are able to behave pretty much as they wish, regardless of due process or fairness, at least in some situations. Is that an outrageous statement? A few years ago I would have said yes, absolutely. But now I know better.

continued below

Obviously I have had my confidence in the police and courts destroyed. I still have some degree of respect for both, as they can’t all be rotten apples, but I vow to stay away from them if at all earthly possible.

‘O well, they have done well then’, you say. ‘You won’t get yourself into any trouble again if you are that strongly determined to stay away from them’. Well, I got myself into no trouble in the first place. Trouble sought me out on that day in December 2001, no two ways about it.

The main problem with my intense desire to stay away from them is that I won’t be making any more complaints of any sort, unless absolutely necessary. As I said in an earlier post, I have made a string of complaints to the police about dangerous driving over several years. Well, never again. That is most unfortunate, because I will maintain that the public have every right and indeed a duty to complain about dangerous and otherwise illegal activities, and expect the police to act on them.

This is not the only instance of rotten police behaviour that I have witnessed. There have been a handful of other incidents, all of the same very minor nature in themselves, but certainly not minor when the cops play up. There have been some fair and reasonable interactions too, thank goodness.

So I was screwed by one particular police officer and then screwed by one particular magistrate. Meanwhile, the driver who perpetrated the situation, who had his wife and two kids in the car at the time, remained free to wipe himself, his family and one or more innocent people out with his extraordinarily bad driving.

I wonder how many people face situations like this? Probably many. And most of them can’t do anything about it. Their issue is either not worth pursuing through the courts due to a highly disproportionate expense of time, energy and/or money, and/or a lack of confidence that justice will prevail. Or if they do go to court, they find that the onus is actually on them to prove or very strongly indicate innocence, rather than the other way around.

It seems that with very minor offences, and that includes most traffic offences, this is our reality.

So how many wrongful prosecutions get thrust upon us? How many essentially good drivers get driven to drive in a rougher manner in order roll with the flow and not risk riling people and suffering road-rage or risky-driving incidents? How many drivers just turn a blind eye to bullsh.t antics on our roads when they should go to the police with an official complaint?

Needless to say, I am fundamentally and utterly disgusted with this whole scenario. The police and courts have got a hell of a lot to answer for.

Incidentally, a friend of mine who had just travelled a few hundred kilometres as a passenger complained that the driver was a chronic tailgater, often sticking very close to the vehicle in front and not overtaking when he could. There you go. Some people just drive like that….because they haven’t had a significant accident yet or because they are so dumb that they don’t appreciate risk factors and safety margins and don’t learn with time, until they have an accident…and BECAUSE THEY HAVE NEVER BEEN TRAINED.

Alright then, to the next issue: roadworks.

I’m afraid I just cannot escape levelling scathing criticism over this issue.

Wot’s me gripe you ask? Well, it’s the use of temporary speed limit signs without any semblance of enforcement. In just about every instance this means that the signs are interpreted as nothing more than a crude indication to slow down a bit.

Why do I hate this so much? Because of the awful conflict it places the law-abiding or police-fearing driver under. If you slow down to anywhere near the temporary slow speed when you come to the signs you almost always get the vehicle behind you coming right up your bumhole, very strongly telling you that you are a fool for slowing down so much. The same applies on the other side of the actual roadworks area, before the signs that return you to normal speed. This is so chronic that you can often be travelling as much as 40kmh faster than the signs indicate and still incur the wrath of drivers behind you for going too slow.

It is a greatly heightened example of the schism that exists between the actual lawful speed and the speed that you can get away with, on any urban or rural road, highway or freeway…, which I have elucidated, in earlier posts on this thread.

At roadworks the police have essentially trained us to NOT obey the signs, but to do some ethereal speed well in excess, just so long as you slow down a bit. Then every so often they will actually monitor a roadworks site (very rarely) and book people for doing exactly what they have essentially trained them to do.

Quite frankly, I would rather travel well in excess of the stated temporary limit in order to not get tailgated or rile drivers behind me, than to stick to the law and get treated as though you are scum by other road-users.

More below

So why do the Main Road Dept and local councils, both of whom are in charge of roadworks sites, allow this situation to exist? Well, they will say that it is the role of the police to enforce speed limits, not them. To that I say, bollocks! If they are going to put up signs and those signs are not going to be observed, then it is up to them to deal with it. How dare they just accept that traffic will travel through roadworks sites, close to their workers, at 20 or more kmh over the stated signage?

One way that both of these bodies attempt to deal with the situation is to put up temporary speed signs that are far too slow for the situation, because they know most drivers will do at least 20kmh faster. Well, that is just plain irresponsible, and of course it just promulgates the situation.

A couple of years ago I made a whole series of official complaints to the Qld Main Roads Dept over this and other issues at roadworks sites. Well I got a better response than I received from the police over previous attempts to report dangerous drivers (discussed in earlier posts). Some debate ensued. My points were taken on board. But, you guessed it; NOTHING has changed. I was referred to the manual by which all Main Roads Dept roadworks supervisors are supposed to operate. Well, in many instances they just don’t. And as for council workers, oh just forget it completely! It’s just seems like free-for-all, based on what some person with no training and little concept of safety thinks is a fair thing. Yeah ok, sometimes they do reasonably well…. but rarely. One local council seemed to be on top of it, but I just can’t remember which one now, dammit

Well, the national road toll this Christmas – New Year period was just horrific. It was up 58% from last year to 76. The national toll for 2005 was 1600, not to mention injuries and trauma for thousands more. This is the most intolerable situation.

So we are getting a special road safety summit in Queensland in February. Good. Let’s makes sure it counts for something.

Over next several posts, I will present my ideas (yes that means a fair bit of repetition of what I have already put on this thread).

1. Make it a national summit.

2. Instead of blaming the condition of our roads, we need to point the finger fairly and squarely at drivers and the policing regime.

Rather than pouring the many hundreds of millions of dollars into road upgrades, let’s use this enormous amount of money to improve driver skills and keep them accountable. It really riles me when certain authorities do nothing other than call for more road funding in response to this carnage, which is a common response.

Beyond basic maintenance, and improvements at some so-called black spots, just about the only thing that we really need in terms of road improvements are vastly more speed limit signs, so that drivers know what the speed limit is at any point….instead of the current absurd situation where there are far too many examples of very long distances between signs, long distances from the point at which you enter a road before you see a sign, and in short, far too much room for error in interpreting the speed limit.

Further to 2:

I would have thought that the Australian Automobile Association was one of the main organisations concerned with road safety.

But their website is very disappointing with respect to road safety, in that it concentrates on roads. On the front page, we have three main links; to an article on 1600 deaths in 2005, to the Australian Road Assessment Program and to the SaferRoads website. The article, on the road toll, is completely oriented towards road improvements, which I think is just terrible. By the author’s own admission, even the most effective road improvements would probably only cut the toll by less than 20%. The ‘What’s new at AAA’ page lists articles, speeches, reports, etc for the last couple of years. Again, there is nothing on driver-training or policing! At least under ‘press releases’ there is a bit more depth. But it is all very disappointing.

This indicates to me that we really don't have the issue anywhere near strongly enough impressed in our collective psyche.

3. A massive effort is needed to improve driver skills. A much more rigorous training regime MUST be implemented before people can earn the right to hold a drivers licence. Practical and theory elements need to be exhaustive. This should include full defensive driving, the consequences of causing an accident by way of unlawful driving or lack of due care, first aid, basic mechanical stuff… the works. This could be conducted as part of the school curriculum for most new drivers.

Every current driver should be required to demonstrate their knowledge of the road rules and their driving skills, or be compelled to do a similar course, or else forfeit their licence.

Every driver should be required to do a refresher course every ?five years, in just the same way as first aid refresher courses are required if you want to keep your qualifications.

4. The police need to be much less conspicuous and meld into the traffic. Instead of the Qld Government’s recent silly concept of bright red highly conspicuous police cars, ALL police cars should be unmarked, but identifiable immediately and unambiguously when required. Every reasonably new vehicle would then potentially be a police vehicle, in the minds of all drivers.

We could add a couple more aspects to reinforce it;

Every police officer should have the power (and the inclination) to deal with unlawful drivers at any time, including when they are off-duty and not in a police vehicle (do they have this power now?). If this was the case (and they were encouraged to do it), then in the minds of all drivers practically every vehicle on the road could potentially hold a police officer.

The police presence on our roads is currently so conspicuously small that most dangerous and offensive drivers have little chance of being sprung. Cop cars stand out like dogs balls, to the extent that most drivers have ample opportunity to ‘adjust’ their driving behaviour as soon as they see a police vehicle, and then adjust it back again as soon as the ‘law’ disappears.

This could be augmented with a form of community policing, whereby people can become accredited community police officers, after doing a rigorous course, and be empowered to deal with reckless drivers in the same manner as formal police officers (just as some non-police council officers are empowered to issue parking tickets and the like).

We have also got to greatly improve the way in which complaints are dealt with, so that any member of the public can report dangerous drivers and expect their efforts to count for something.

The whole idea is to make it impossible to tell who is a police officer or a conscientious citizen who is able and willing to take action, so that practically every adult in the community could potentially cause trouble for those who play up. This would surely reduce the extent of stupid antics on our roads right down to a bare minimum.

5. Of course, in conjunction with point 4, the real number of police on the roads, and in the whole road safety sector needs to be greatly increased

6. The police have got police ALL road rules that pertain to safety (and that means all road rules, full stop). They should place particular emphasis on aggressive, intimidating, offensive and impatient driving because drivers who exhibit these aspects are closely correlated with risk-takers and accident-causers. One of the main ways that this sort of driving manifests itself is in tailgating, which is something that goes completely unpoliced. Tailgating demonstrates that a driver does not understand or appreciate basic safety margins and risks. It demonstrates a willingness to drive in a risky manner for a high portion of the time. There is a very clear correlation between drivers who tailgate and drivers who cause accidents, as shown by nose-to-tail accidents being the number one source of motor vehicle insurance claims.

This needs to happen in conjunction with a publicity campaign, so that people who have come to understand that various laws don’t get policed, will be forewarned, rather than getting nabbed for things that the police have effectively trained them to do, by way of inaction

7. The policing regime has got to be uniform across the country.

I believe the young are good drivers.Their reflexes and intuition are strong.Too strong for us oldies on the roads that need to swerve out of their way to avoid an accident!
Do you REALLY want to curb road accidents? Well here is what you have to do:
How many people are killed on the roads every year,yet how many are given a licence?
The road toll says we must reduce every year ,yet hundreds, maybe thousands of new drivers are joining us on the roads each year and therefore the road toll truly isn't all that bad!
(How i would dearly wish that every Victorian would maintain the speed limit to stop those slimy bastards from picking up another cent of revenue from us.) What type of message would that send?

If you really want to stop hoons and idiots on our streets here is what our Government has to do:
Between the ages of 18 to 25 only bright pink Hyundais stock standard 4 cyl for males and white for the girls.That's it!
This way,they will only drive through the back streets at night for fear they will be seen by their mates and we as credible Victorian road users will be able to spot these probationary drivers on the road as they will be "lit up" in their colours of pink and white.
This will also help to curb the males ego of owning a bigger and more expensive car than i do.
Reduce the volume of techno rap/crap emminating from a stereo on wheels and lo how i would dearly LOVE to see Mr.Macho SuperStud roll up next to me at the lights in his bright pink 4 cyl stock standard Hyundai!
Truth is,an accident is just that,an accident.Not meant to happen but somehow did.It doesn't really matter how many die,only how many that can pay.Until we as a community force a change,....nothing more will happen.
I truly don't believe the government is serious about road safety.Not until i see Mr.Macho pull up beside me at the lights in his bright pink stock standard 4 cyl Hyundai.

Nothing positive is going to happen unless Judges and Magistrates WAKE UP and put these nongs off the road and make sure they stay off for the full term of the sentence. Jail repeat offenders. Idiots must be separated physically from the rest of road users.

O no, my run of consecutive postings has been terminated!! How awful.

Hold on….. there IS actually someone (2 people even!) out there who has read at least some of my raving-loony rantings and taken the time to respond. How excellent.

You make a very good point BlackBob. Let’s get rid of this absurd status-symbol penis-extension element to the cars of young males. They and all new drivers (and not 17 and 18 year-olds) should be required to start off with small cars (crikey, we have this sort of thing with motorbikes, why not cars?). Yes, something that would be very hard to construe as a status symbol should be enforced.

I have just driven around Tassie for four weeks in a bright red tiny pooncey Hyundai Getz hire car. It made me cringe when I first saw it – all I knew was that I had booked a small car, which was presumably some benign colour. But it was perfectly adequate.

Of course this also makes eminent sense with rapidly rising fuel prices, an ever-greater awareness of greenhouse gas emissions and an absolute imperative to reduce per-capita energy consumption in preparation for peak oil (see a whole range of my posts of these subjects under various threads on OLO).

I absolutely agree with you: “I truly don’t believe the government is serious about road safety”. But I don’t agree that the “road toll truly isn’t all that bad”. Even considering the forever greater number of drivers, we cannot for one moment condone or tolerate the horrific mortality and injury rates.

8. The law has to be upheld at face value. So where you see a 60kmh sign, you cannot do 61 without risking getting nabbed. Where you see a stop sign, you stop. The onus must be put back on drivers to at least obey those laws that are crystal clear. The onus is just as much on the police to stop turning a blind eye and start upholding this standard. But again, not without a comprehensive publicity campaign beforehand.

Car-owners and drivers should be required to know the accuracy of their speedometers, something that can be easily determined with a GPS, and to be aware that it changes as tyres wear and especially when they get new tyres. If there is to be any leniency, it should be due entirely to the error margin in police speed-measuring devices, which these days is very small. Even with this error margin, the onus should be put on drivers to stay that particular amount under the limit, or risk getting nabbed.

The current situation is absurd; where a 60k sign effectively means 70, a 100k sign 110, etc, and a stop sign means give way. As previously mentioned, there seems to be a pretty uniform 10kmh buffer in Qld, except in some 40k school zones, and there seems to be widespread acceptance by police that drivers don’t stop at stop signs if they don’t have to. But then occasionally they will set up a trap and nab every driver that doesn’t stop completely, no matter how careful they are, which is a stinker of thing to do, given that they effectively train people to treat stop signs as giveway signs. (No I haven’t been caught in one of these, thank goodness, because my self-control would really be tested if I was).

(Don’t you just hate mongrel typos, re: 6. The police have to police ALL road rules…)

Further to 8:

An alternative to speed limit signs being treated at face value: – call them speed zones rather than limits. For example, change the meaning of 60kmh speed limit signs to 60kmh speed zones, indicating a 60 to 70kmh zone, where the absolute speed limit is 70. This would maintain the current 10kmh buffer and prevent the inevitable backlash that the community would launch if speed limits were to be strictly observed.

It would also be useful in dealing with the ever-present problem of drivers travelling too slow and not showing due courtesy to people behind them. There should be the requirement to travel within that speed zone, under ideal conditions. If you can’t travel within that speed range, you are required to facilitate traffic behind in overtaking you, if they can’t do it easily of their own accord. This requirement exists in law now for slow vehicles, but of course it is very rarely observed or policed.

9. Reform of the relationship between police and courts, and onus placed on them to perform their duties properly.

The police can charge people based on very little evidence when it comes to minor matters, thinking that the person is very unlikely to challenge, due to the amount of effort that it would take to go to court compared to the penalty, or because they feel that if the person wishes to challenge, it is then up to a magistrate to sort if out with no skin of the cop’s nose if the person gets off.

But magistrates take the view that if the police charge someone in the first place, they must have a very good reason. They figure that the cop was in a much better position than the magistrate to make a decision on the matter. This basically means that magistrates put the onus of rightful action on police officers, while the police put the onus of rightful action on the courts...some of the time. This is a significant issue with small infringements and alleged infringements, which includes most road safety matters.

This means one awful thing – the charged person has to prove or very strongly (beyond a reasonable doubt) indicate their innocence, because a magistrate is very likely to hold solidarity with the police. But it is supposed to be a basic tenet of our legal system that the onus be on the prosecution to show that the person is guilty. The legal system is perverted when it comes to minor charges. I can vouch for this from personal experience. (To what extent this occurs is very hard to say, but from my experience, it seemed entrenched).

It says a lot about the brainpower of politicians, when they gave young people the right to to drive on the same day as they could legally get on the booze -their 18th birthday. Who was it said - "We are in the hands of idiots" ?

10. Truth in sentencing. (Yeah I agree totally with your sentiments of 14/1 Big Al).

A stated jail sentence must be the real time served.

Magistrates should not be able to fine people then not record a conviction. This is dumb hypocrisy, which serves only to devalue the legal system. The size of the fine can vary depending on circumstances, but not the recording of a conviction.

The general public need to be able to make their case in court in such a manner that is not ridiculously expensive compared to the charge or the likely penalty. The cost of legal representation is usually vastly beyond the cost of just copping the fine (and demerit points and recorded misdemeanour). So private citizens need to be able to meaningfully represent themselves, in a balanced manner.

The system effectively strongly discourages people from challenging fines or charges that they feel are unjust. It needs to very strongly do just the opposite. This is of fundamental importance to the very purpose of the legal system. How dare the system be out of reach or exorbitantly unbalanced when it comes to minor charges, especially with the tendency for police to charge people without sufficient evidence, as explained under point 9!

I will go as far saying that the legal system should actively advertise its services; ‘if you feel the police have wrongly charged you with a traffic offence, then go to court. You WILL get a fair hearing’ (and you will get expenses refunded if you are found innocent).

Magistrates need to have a much better appreciation of the significance of dangerous antics on our roads and deal with offenders accordingly. In keeping with the blasé nature that society in general has over road carnage, magistrates don’t deal toughly enough with obvious offenders.

Those who lose their licence due to accrual of too many demerit points or otherwise repeat offences should not only be put off the road, but behind bars. Those who make it clear that they cannot control their law-breaking and hence risky driving must be very solidly dealt with.

11. Make sure the policing of road safety matches the significance of the issue.

While I really don’t want to see any other areas of policing reduced, I think that a considerably larger portion of police effort should go towards road safety.

The traffic branch, or section that deals with road safety issues, or the road-safety portion of a police officer’s duties, in any Australian police department are generally rather poorly regarded. But why?? Road safety is all about preventing death and destruction, injury and other serious consequences. These consequences affect thousands of people every year. Surely there are few sectors of policing that are more significant. The traffic branch needs to regain its rightful pride-of-place both within the police service, and in the community by way of a concerted promotional campaign, which should go in conjunction with a much increased community-awareness campaign about road safety and the policing of it.

Lets make sure that the example that I outlined in my post of 24/12/05 (where police were putting in an appearance but not doing anything meaningful), becomes a thing of the past.

A lot of the points that I have mentioned here deal with police performance. This really is one of the critical factors, because most people innately do not respect the law, they respect what they can get away with. So even with the best driver-training regime, a strong enforcement regime would still be needed.

[O bugger, I found a really wanky typo – in my first posting of 14/1; “and not 17 and 18 year olds”, should read “and not JUST 17 and 18 year olds”.]

12. Publicity. While a lot of effort is being put into television and general media campaigns, regarding drink driving and the other fatal three, and has been for many years, we need to really gear up and vastly broaden this public expression. This needs to go in conjunction with greatly increased driver training and a greatly improved policing regime.

Drivers need to know that 60kmh speed limit signs will effectively mean what they say, before the police start strictly policing them. Likewise with stop signs, etc, etc.

Drivers also need to know that they will be booked for driving behaviour that demonstrates impatience, aggression and reduced safety margins, such as my pet hate; tailgating. They need to know that the practically unknown law of ‘failing to show due care or courtesy to other road-users’ will be enforced vigorously.

As I said earlier, most drivers don’t respect the law, they only respect what they can get away with, and they make a judgement as to the risks of getting caught before they undertake unlawful activity. So we need to impress on them (and on the whole community) that the likelihood of getting caught is going to be greatly increased, and not just for the obvious infringements that the police have concentrated on to date

Summary of my concerns and suggestions for improvements in road safety.

1. Make the forthcoming Qld road safety summit a national summit.

2. Instead of spending many millions of dollars on roads, spend the majority of it on improving driver skills and the policing regime.

3. A massive effort is needed to improve driver skills, including rigorous training up front, with regular revisions.

4. The policing regime needs a great deal of work, including police being much less conspicuous and melding into the traffic, all police officers having the power and the inclination to deal with dangerous drivers at all times, including when they are off-duty, community policing and a greatly improved system for handling complaints about dangerous driving.

5. The real number of police on the roads and behind the scenes needs to be greatly increased.

6. The police have got to deal with ALL road rules, and not just the small set that are relatively easy, such as speed and drink-driving.

7. The policing regime has got to be uniform across the country.

8. The law has to upheld at face value.

9. The relationship between police and the courts needs reform and each needs to uphold its responsibilities and not rely on the other.

10. We need truth in sentencing and we need magistrates to treat road safety matters more seriously. The courts needs to be practicably accessible to all people, no matter how minor the issue. And of course, the notion of being innocent until proven guilty has to be upheld.

11. The policing effort needs to match the significance of the issue.

12. Publicity.

Some of these could have been split into a number of points, especially 4 and 10. There are no doubt others, which I will add to the list when they come to mind.

It all basically comes down to point 2.

This is a pretty raw expression from someone who is by no means an expert in this field, but who is obviously very concerned about it and has been for many years

Well….. have you finished now Ludwig?? Got it off your chest eh, you loony? Gonna give us all break? All bleated and blithered out?

Ahhh Ludwig...being passionate about a cause is a wonderful thing - even if it does make you "bleated and blithered out" :)

Haaaaa

Fat chance Luddie. You ain’t seen nothing yet!! There’s a million more things to say on this subject.

Hi Coraliz

Much appreciated comments. Thank yu

I hate stop signs. In 99.99% of all cases they should be replaced with giveway signs. There should be no compulsion to stop if you don’t have to in order to give way. Stop signs are an affront to our intelligence. They diminish respect for the law, because they are overkill.

The police tend to turn a blind eye to drivers who take it cautiously but don’t actually stop. Then every once in a while they will undertake a stinky little trap and book everyone who doesn’t come to an absolute halt, including little old grannies who drive very carefully all the time and have never had an accident in their lives.

One of the important tenets of road safety is engendering respect for the law. But in order for that to happen, the law has got to be fair and reasonable and be seen to be appropriate.

Getting rid of stop signs and with them that aspect of the blind-eyed police syndrome and the stinky little trap syndrome, would surely work towards a better impression of police in the eyes of all drivers. Respect for law enforcers is another important part of road safety.

In my town stop signs are used as traffic-calming devices by breaking long straight stretches into short segments. This often means that very minor suburban streets have the right of way over roads with higher traffic volumes. That is frustrating and I think and improper use of stop signs. At any rate, giveway signs would do the same job. We have had giveway signs replaced with stop signs and we have also seen one of the most curious absurdities of all time proliferate in the backstreets; four-way stop sign intersections! Now THAT is an affront to one’s intelligence, well and truly!

Continued….

Stop signs also create problems with right of way. For example; if you want to turn right at a stop sign and there is a vehicle opposite coming straight ahead, also on a stop sign, they have the right of way… but only if they have come to a complete stop first... unless neither of you have stopped... in which case neither has the right of way, coz you are both driving illegally! But the lawful technicalities don’t mean much in the real world unless an accident results, and then you cannot rely on the police or magistrates to know the detail of the law and whatever the case it is just about impossible to prove or show beyond a reasonable doubt. It gets mucky at the technical level. Giveway signs simplify this sort of thing. As for the legal technicalities at 4-way stop sign intersections, I don’t even want to think about it.

So in the interests of increasing respect for the law and law enforcers, making the law more appropriate for the circumstances, and not insulting the intelligence of most drivers, everyone with a bulbar on their 4WD should go out and flatten a few stop signs! O alright, I guess not. But they should be progressively replaced with giveway signs.

I hate cyclists. Yes those damn pesky runtish ignoramuses on two wheels who seem to have no regard for road rules or their own safety.

Hold on, I am a cyclist… and have been for 36 years. Alright I take it back, I only hate cyclists other than me!

No seriously, what I do hate is the lack of clarity of law as it pertains to cyclists. I have found it impossible to get straight reliable answers from police, RACQ, Dept of Transport or my local council. I am left totally bewildered.

Apparently it is illegal for a vehicle to pass another vehicle in the same lane. But of course cyclists are in the same lane as the cars whizzing past them. It is legal to ride in the middle of the lane, even when you are doing 25kmh in a 60k zone for example.

Apparently it is legal for cyclists to ride on any footpath, as long as there is not a sign indicating that they can’t, and they give pedestrians the right of way. Apparently it is illegal for cyclists to ride the wrong way on the road, ie along the righthand side, but it is not illegal for them to ride the wrong way on a footpath. Apparently it is legal for cyclists to ride on the road when there is a cycleway right next to them. Cyclists have to wear a helmet, and have to have lights at night when riding on the road, but apparently not on the footpath. Cyclists have to stop at stop signs and traffic lights just like all other traffic, but they can apparently legally nip up the curb and along the footpath and go past these obstacles.

It is an absolute mess. And yet year after year there seems no will to straighten it out. Not only does the public not know the law, neither do the police or any other authorities, and yet the police will be the first to tell us that ignorance of the law is no excuse.

We see just the same sort of extremely selective policing of road safety with respect to cyclists as we see with the general policing of road safety (which I have discussed in full on this thread).

From observations around my town over many years, the police tend to book or warn cyclists without helmets at least a fair bit of the time, but inexplicably they turn a blind eye to cyclists riding up the wrong side of the road or riding at night without lights. The latter two things are much more dangerous than not wearing a helmet.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I have witnessed the police ignore a cyclist undertaking these infringements or more to the point, undertaking these totally unnecessary and very significant risks.

As with most tailgaters and other risk-taking drivers, by not enforcing these laws the police are effectively training cyclists to behave in this way.

Also, as with other risk-takers, cyclists who put themselves at risk do so without really knowing what risks they are taking, and without being prepared to take quick action if necessary. Those who are prepared to take quick aversive or defensive action are those that have the presence of mind not to put themselves under unnecessary risk in the first place.

I’ve got the brightest double headlights I could find on my bike. I wouldn’t have anything less. These d.ckhead cyclists without lights, half of whom also ride up the wrong side of the road, are a real hazard to legitimate cyclists.

Alright, so you think this business is so trivial that I shouldn’t be wasting my time with it. Well, in the early evenings, lightless and brainless cyclists are prolific all around my town, outnumbering lighted cyclists at least ten to one. It is a very significant road-safety factor.

We are also likely to see a proliferation of cyclists in the near future as fuel prices continue to rise. So it is pertinent to sort out this aspect of road safety sooner rather than later

Even worse than cyclists riding at night with no lights are cyclists with these pathetic little white flashing lights on the front of their bikes. Man, they are bad news! I very nearly took out one of these lunatics a couple of nights ago, and as you can imagine after perusing the comments that I have put on this thread, I am about as careful as any driver can be.

These little flashing lights are actually more dangerous than no lights, both for the cyclists and the drivers who encounter them. They give a false sense of security. So whereas a cyclist may be inclined to be very careful and be ready to take evasive action if they don’t have a light, they don’t have this inclination when they have one of these flashing doovers. The cyclists that have these flashing lights tend to be those that travel fast, making the risk all the greater.

These things should be banned outright. ONLY decent headlights should be allowed.

As for red flashing taillights, no worries, they are good value.

So why am I in favour of flashing taillights but not headlights? Well, I’m so glad you asked.

Two reasons; the difference in brightness between flashing tail-lights and car taillights is nowhere near as great as with the headlights, which means that the flashing taillights don’t get lost amongst other red lights to anywhere near the same extent as pissy little flashing headlights do amongst really bright car headlights.

Secondly, when coming up behind a cyclist, a driver has much more time to see a cyclist, and make sure that they don’t sideswipe them or rear-end them. There is a low risk compared to a cyclist coming up on a vehicle that is potentially about to turn in front of them, for example.

This issue with lights, and with the rules and policing of cycling in general, is just another example of our absurdly poorly managed road-safety regime that could so easily be rectified.

So Ludwig, how do you feel about the inconsiderate twerps who think it's unnecessary to dip their high-beam until your car and theirs are just about to pass? And how terrifying is it that in 15 years time, the 4WD that's being marketed with the slogan 'get in or get out of the way' - Toyota and its advertising agency should be charged with incitement to something or other for that, as should the TV channels which run it - wil be the clapped out old banger some 17-year-old gets as a first car? What do you think of the idea of sliding scales for registration charges on 4WDs, by postcode, with a $5000 cost premium for those registered to inner city addresses, $2000 for suburban adddresses, $1000 for outer metropolitan, and a few more besides?

Anomie

I don’t find high beams too much of a problem. Annoying yes, but the vast majority of the time when you flash your headlights you get results. My experience as a passenger with drivers that fail to lower their headlights is that it is usually just a touch of absent-mindedness or sometimes a lack of judgement. But we will never get around minor issues of judgement or lack of full concentration. The best way to deal with it to signal your discontent, in a non-offensive manner. With this particular issue it is simple.

Extending the concept of signalling one’s discontent - it is often impossible to send simple messages without them being taken the wrong way. This is one aspect of road safety that I haven’t discussed. I reckon there should be a standard set of signals that drivers can use for various offences or circumstances in which they are affected by other drivers’ actions. Tailgating is my primary consideration in this regard.

I think there are fundamental problems with a lot of vehicle advertising, not least those that concentrate on presenting an image not in keeping with careful safe driving.

We could implement sliding scales in all sorts of ways. Some of these would have considerable merit, but we would have to be careful to make it as fair as possible.

A sliding scale for 4WDs depending on distance from city centre has some merit, but you would also have to consider what the vehicle is used for. For example, I am an urban dweller who owns a 4WD. A lot of the time it gets used for local commuting. But I bought it because I am a field-oriented botanist and geologist… and it gets frequent use in low range 4WD in places that I wouldn’t be able to get to without it. I think I compromise very nicely by cycling to work and around town a lot of the time. I would object to having to pay a higher premium than a city-edge rural residential dweller who hardly ever uses their 4WD for 4WD purposes.

Ludwig, oh Luuuuudwiiig…. are you out there?

Don’t tell me you’ve given up.

Or or or reached the end of your crappy claptrap!

Ow ullow Luddie. Nize ov you to pop up.

Wotz zis about clappy crabtrap?

Yair mate I give up.

Wot’z the boint? In a vew years zere wont be enny carz on th raod ennyway.

So I may azwel zust get drunk zzz a szgunk inzdead

By crikey, no I DON’T give up!!

Well I have just missed being wiped out by hair’s breadth. A vehicle turned into the road in front of me and headed straight towards me, on my side of the road, and stayed on the wrong side until the very last minute. I initially stuck my hand out the window and waved vigorously, then flashed my headlights and blasted the horn. I got right off the road. Another oncoming vehicle, which this turd cut off, also got right off the road, and would have served as a perfect witness.

But I just kept going.

A couple of years ago I would have gone straight to the police. But now I know that that is futile. That’s a hell of state of affairs, when someone as concerned about road safety and good policing as myself, considers an action as blatantly dangerous as this as not being worth my while taking to the cops.

Only a few days ago I followed another vehicle on the same stretch of road for about 4km. This driver was very erratically dipping and weaving well across the other side of the road, in front of oncoming traffic and sporadically changing speed.

Again, this is exactly the sort of thing that EVERY citizen should feel compelled to report to the police. But I just let it go.

The state of policing in my town has reached a critical point, with the police stopping work and holding an emergency meeting, followed a by great deal of publicity in the local media. But this situation has existed for years, and it is not only in this town but right across the state.

This is particularly relevant to a current thread on OLO: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4191. (see my comments)

continued

Last week there was a public road-safety meeting held in my town. There was also a state road safety forum held recently.

I can’t for the life of me believe that in neither of these events, the state of the policing of road safety didn’t register as one of the most significant factors. This is crazy! What is the point of implementing greater penalties or restrictions if the policing regime is going to remain so dismal that the chances of being caught are tiny…or that you can’t get a complaint attended to unless an accident has occurred?

Come on Mt Beatty, how about using some of the profits from Queensland’s enormous economic growth that you so loudly espouse as being of your making, to actually improve the quality of life for Queenslanders, or at least stop it from going backwards. The very least you can do is maintain a half-respectable police force.

I have just travelled that ugly Bruce Highway between Mackay and Townsville.

Complaining to police is useless, so I’ll do it here –

Semi-trailer. All-white cab and trailer. No company markings. Trailer number – 311 QFG. Cab – 072 HOL. Date 28/02/06.

This truckdriver indicated scant respect for the law and a willingness to use his vehicle as a tool to bully all other vehicles.

Firstly, he cut in front of me very sharply as he turned into the highway. He could see me coming well before he moved, and he simply knew that I had no choice at all but to cop it sweet and slow down from 100 to about 20kmh. I couldn’t overtake, so I just had to wear it.

Then I followed him through town and overtook on the other side. I came up behind a slower vehicle, doing about 90. He just blasted on past both of us, on a curve, without being able to see sufficiently far ahead.

I followed this truck from Home Hill to Proserpine. He was pushing 110 in the 100 zone constantly, creeping over a little here and there. He came up behind several vehicles, followed too closely, although not full-on tailgating like some truckdrivers do. He overtook many times.

It seems that trucks can sit right 10ks over the limit with total impunity. I have witnessed this quite few times. When these things overtake, there is considerable risk – they need a lot of road, especially when they are overtaking vehicles that are themselves sitting just under 110kmh.

So whatever happened to speed-limited trucks? You used to see them all the time – limited to 100kmh, with notices on the back saying as much.

Did the authorities realise that there was a real risk generated by cars overtaking these trucks at great frequency? Maybe

So then, why don’t trucks get speed-limited at 105 or 107? Currently, travelling at 110, and for the greater part being tailgaters and abject bullies, we have a real safety concern that just simply shouldn’t be there and could so easily be dealt with.

Travelling between Mackay and Eungella you go though numerous changes of speed limit. It is hard to keep track of which speed zone you are in all the time, especially when there is a poor correlation between conditions (eg side roads and built-up areas) and speed zones, and a grossly insufficient number of speed signs.

I travelled this road a couple of days ago. A number of times I had vehicles close behind, travelling too close and thus making it patently clear that they wanted me to go faster. But I was sitting close to 10kmh hour over the limit and I stretched the slow-down into lower speed zones and the speed-up into faster zones as much as I dared. This was still nowhere near sufficient to stave off these aggressive wank.rs.

It seems that there are actually three sets of rules applying –

1. the face-level speed limit as displayed on speed signs, which we could call the old granny rule, as they are just about the only ones who observe it,

2. the 10k-over-is-just-fine rule, which is accepted by practically everyone including the police and

3. the who gives a pink sh.t rule, observed by those who know that there is no police presence on certain roads or that they will get off if they are pulled over by the local copper, or that they are just going to take the risk and drive as they see fit regardless of any laws.

Again, one of the biggest aspects to road safety is the piss poor policing regime. And one aspect of this is the powerlessness that people who are subjected to illegal, aggressive and dangerous antics on the roads feel – powerlessness due to the futility of them taking complaints to the police. Is it any wonder that sometimes people take matters into their own hands. Yes, the pathetic policing regime has got a great deal to do with road rage.

No matter how well trained people are, it won’t count for much if there is stuff-all enforcement.

One of the big problems with the policing regime, and there are many, is the misuse of police discretionary powers. The police have the ‘right’ to ignore infringements of all sorts and to treat people very differently regarding the same sort of offence….. apparently.

I have witnessed this twice in the most extraordinarily blatant manner. I was on the losing end both times. Both times the relevant police officer protected the local citizen and did whatever was necessary to see that the out-of-towner copped it.

That’s a pretty big allegation. I would be more than happy to elaborate, to the extent of making or remaking formal complaints, if the police ever read this forum and wish to follow it up. Just provide a contact. One of these instances did result in a thorough formal complaint, which then led onto another issue – the officer to whom I complained went out of his way to protect the complainee officer, even though he lived and worked in a town hundreds of kilometres away.

So as well as the actual safety factor, this whole road safety business stinks in another very significant manner – the powerlessness factor. You can’t do anything about rank drivers when they place you under unnecessary risk nor afterwards with the police, unless they have actually caused an accident or perhaps done something really brazenly dangerous… and even if your could, you would be most reluctant to do so, given the unreliable nature of how the police might deal with you.

Even if instances like this are in the tiny minority, which I don’t believe they are, they are the ones that you really remember and which affect you for life. I have managed to have very little to do with police overall. Most encounters were reasonable but a significant portion of them weren’t. This comes from someone who has no criminal record and went for 24 or more years without incurring a demerit point while being a prolific driver the whole time and who has never incurred a more serious driving infringement than a speeding ticket.

I was driving home this evening after dark on a four-lane road, when a car came up behind me in the inside lane and went past with no headlights on. One car in front of me flashed its brakelights and one oncoming car flashed its headlights.

Drivers are not averse to giving signals in some situations, most notably in this situation, on the highway when you have an oncoming vehicle with its high beam on and when indicating to oncoming traffic that there is a speed trap ahead.

These sorts of signals are taken in good faith, although signalling the presence of police is highly dodgy.

Why then can’t we signal our displeasure to tailgaters, speeders, etc?

Simply putting up with the added risk of having a vehicle aggressively and impatiently following you far too closely can surely not be condoned. The police and other bodies surely cannot expect us to do that. But that is exactly what they effectively do – expect us to cop it sweet. The RACQ and police advise us not to give signals.

What could be wrong with flashing your brakelights at a tailgater or putting your arm out the window and waving them back? If these were formalised methods of indicating discontent, and they were publicised as part of road-safety awareness campaigns, then the issue of tailgating or following too closely and of nose-to-tail accidents could be greatly reduced.

Simple.

See some debate on fast drivers under ‘Bound by rules’ by Caspar Conde 10/03/06 (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4242#35173)

Gee wouldn’t it be just lovely if someone on behalf of the Qld Police (or any Australian police dept), or an ex-police officer (Belly, where are you?) was to respond to this thread? See my comments six posts back (26/02/06).

There has got to be somebody in the police force who is monitoring OLO who can respond.

Come-on. How about a bit of debate on this stuff.

You know why the cops won’t respond Luddie, even if they did discover this obscure Ludwig-ridden thread…. coz they know that you are right… and therefore there is nothing to debate!

MMMMM interesting

I suppose I have to agree with myself on that matter!!

Anyway, the RACQ wants new measures to halt the soaring number of young motorists being killed on our roads.

In response to the Qld Govt’s discussion paper on reducing road trauma, RACQ called for:

Reducing the learner age to 16 years, with an extended 12-month learner period incorporating compulsory training,

120 hours or more of supervised driver training before sitting the provisional licence test, with a minimum of 10 hours of night driving,

Provisional licences not granted until 17 years or older,

Re-introduction of P-plates, split into two phases, with additional restrictions in the first phase,

No more that one passenger under 21 for P-platers under 21 during first year,

Considering night driving restrictions in the first 6-12 months of a three-year probationary period,

Extend zero tolerance on blood-alcohol levels for all young drivers, even those with open licences, until at least 24.

YES!! Well thank goodness for a bit of meaningful input from RACQ.

Now let’s just bloody hope that the QLD Govt takes SOME of it on board!

Quoted from Sunday Mail 19/03/06

The Qld Govt has just released TV ads asking people to slow down at roadworks sites.

Well I suppose that is good, given the appalling attitude that most drivers have at roadworks….. just blatantly ignoring the temporary speed signs and at best slowing down a bit.

Bloody whimpish ads though. Why couldn’t they impress upon drivers to observe the temporary speed limits signs, instead of imploring them just to ‘slow down’. Every roadworks site is endowed with this signage.

But of course, as always, it will mean precisely nothing, in the absence of increased policing of roadworks sites, which the ads did not allude to at all…. because there will be no increased policing.

So, it means that money has been wasted yet again, in appealing to the public… the vast majority of whom will take absolutely no notice. Surely this money should have been spent on increasing the policing of roadworks sites as well as informing the public that such action was being taken

The Beatty Govt has just announced that drivers will be hit with double demerit points if caught exceeding the speed limit by 20kmh twice in one year.

Good.

But instead of piecemeal announcements like this, how about announcing a whole improved plan for road safety, including many of the things that I have written about on this thread.

At least, in conjunction with stiffer penalties for speeding, we could be told just what the real speed limit is (Is it universally 10 kmh over what the signs say, or what??)

We could start getting greatly improved signage of speed limits, so we know what bloody speed zone we are in all the time, instead of having to guess until we encounter a sign, or battle to remember what the last sign was, if we have been driving for a while through changing speed zones.

We could also get encouragement to report obvious brazen speeders and other dangerous drivers, thus reinforcing the community’s responsibility to not turn a blind eye to this sort of thing, and strengthen the policing regime by placing some power in the hands of the public. The weakness of the policing regime is one of the greatest problems. If any person can make a complaint and have it dealt with properly, the policing regime could be greatly strengthened, and the offence rate greatly reduced.

While I support this move, I have to say that it still seems like rearranging a single deck chair on the Titanic.

The Sunday Mail has a tiny 70 word article hidden away on page 18, telling us about double demerit points.

Not good enough! ANY changes to the law, or any governmental changes that are likely to affect more than the tiniest portion of the populace need to be publicised very prominently so that everyone gets the message. For the government to put out one round of press releases, which result in publicity over one or two days in newspapers and on TV and radio news, is nowhere near good enough.

The public is entitled to know exactly where they stand with all this sort of stuff.

Meanwhile, the new ads imploring us to slow down at roadworks (see my post of 1st April) have either stopped or are of very low frequency. I have only seen one and it has been 8 days since I saw it.

I have to ask, what is the point of doing any of these sorts of things if the message is not hammered home?

A wide range of in-car safety technology is being developed based on cameras and radar to detect danger: things such as the distance between your car and the one in front, pedestrians or other obstacles, changing lanes without indicating, etc.

Some of this sounds good in theory. But I fear that it is taking things in the wrong direction. By taking some control of potentially dangerous situations, responsibility and alertness of the driver is possibly being usurped.

The technology would have to be nothing short of brilliant to be able to foresee every dangerous situation without any false alarms. The potential is very much there for sudden false-alarm computer-triggered braking or evasive action to actually cause an accident rather than prevent one. The system would only need to do this once in the lifetime of the car to totally work against its very purpose.

With such gadgetry, drivers should be required to do extra training until they are thoroughly used to it, before they take their new vehicle on the public roads.

Surely the best thing to do is to greatly improve driver-training rather than rely on this sort of technology.

I admire the initiatives of Mercedes, Audi and others. Some of the basic stuff sounds good, such as radar that keeps your car at a safe distance behind the vehicle in front. Another really good idea would be radar-controlled maximum speed according to the relevant speed limit zone. But once you start mucking around with computer-controlled braking and the like, I’m sorry, but I can’t agree that it is the best way forward for improving road safety.

The Beatty Government is starting to get a little bit serious about road safety.

Today we heard another announcement: There will be a new charge of evading police for those who initiate high-speed chases.

Good. But I don’t get it! Apparently evading from the police or running from the police has not been illegal!! What? There has always been a charge of failure to follow police instructions. My mind boggles.

Qld Transport Minister Paul Lucas says that we aren’t going to really get on top of the road safety issue until people take responsibility for their own actions.

WRONG! You cannot expect a fair portion of people to take responsibility for their own actions on the roads, until there is a very effective police force to make them do so.

The keys to the whole issue are effective policing and proper driver-training. Effective policing needs two major things: greatly increasing police numbers, and a much less conspicuous nature, by making police blend into the community rather stand out like dogs balls. If they were to drive unmarked cars, then every reasonably new car would be seen as a potential police vehicle in the eyes of would-be offenders

Just seen the new Qld road safety ad for the first time.

Bloody hell. Don’t hold back Beatty will you!

Its all very well to pump some bloody startling images into the heads of all Qld TV watchers. Maybe it will make a few people slow down a bit…… maybe.

But let’s get rid the f...ing duplicity.

The bottom line in the ads is ‘every k over is a killer’. But the police, with the full backing of the government, allow us to do a few ks over, in fact 10ks over most if not all of the time!!

This could easily be interpreted as the government allowing people to speed and hence being responsible for bloody road deaths and trauma!

Mr Beatty, if you going to shock the driving public with ads like this, then how about having the decency to order that the law be policed at face value, and advertise that the there will be zero tolerance on speeding! Or tell us officially what the f...ing leniency margin is, so that we all know what the real speed limit is!

If you don’t do this, you are demonstrating utter duplicity!

You must realise that those who practice the letter of the law are held in contempt by other drivers, because they are driving 5 to 10 kmh slower than the accepted cruising speed. This causes its own dangerous circumstances by leading to impatience and hence tailgating and dangerous overtaking.

Cut the crap now and tell us exactly what the go is with speed limits.

‘Australia Talks Back’, ABC radio 13/04/06. All about road safety.

Some very good comments. I was pleased to hear a lot of the concerns that I have expressed on this forum.

A couple of comments:

The guest expert said that doing 65kmh is about twice as dangerous as doing 60. Well! I haven’t heard that before. But if it is anywhere near true, it is a pretty major reason for speed limits to be policed at face value (see my strong comments in the last post). And it means that the government is even more culpable for contradicting their ‘every k over is a killer’ message, by allowing all drivers to do a few ks over.

Tailgating was mentioned by a couple of callers. Better driver-training was a major theme. Good. These are two really big bugbears that I have expressed on this thread.

But nothing was said about the policing regime. What a pity. It seems that people just don’t understand that the policing regime is all-important. Without meaningful policing, a lot of people will do as they like. The law itself means eff-all. This can’t be more obvious than with speed limits, where most drivers do a few ks over in the full knowledge that they are breaking the law, but that the police won’t nab em for it.

Just seen a couple more Qld Govt road safety ads.

Yair good. A bit less confronting and emotive than the first one I saw. Good initiative Mr Beatty.

Now please can we sort out the duplicity with ‘every k over is a killer’ while a few ks over is acceptable.

Re: “We’re all idiots” (Courier Mail 13/04/06)
By Jane Fynes-Clinton

Great article.

The first few paragraphs had me in tears (which was rather embarrassing sitting in a café!).

“There is a definite sense that the same strategies are recycled year after year…”

Yes. And it is nowhere near good enough.

“Bombard learner drivers before they take to the roads, but also make drivers of all ages refresh their skills and sit tests when they renew their licences.”

YES

“Immediately limit the speed of all vehicles sold here”

YES!!

“It is time to do the gutsy thing and unleash everything we’ve got, and all at once”

ABSABLOODYLOOTELY ! ! ! ! ! !

The whole business of road safety should be the responsibility of the Federal Govt and should be uniform across the country. But if the Beatty Govt can take the initiative and really get this stuff happening, then surely the pressure will be right on Howard to follow suit.

The front page of the Sunday Mail (16/04/06) carried the most extraordinary story of a hoon driver who has accrued 121 demerit points and $10000 worth of fines in 5 years, but still holds a drivers licence. We are only supposed to be able to accrue 12 demerit points in a three-year period before losing one’s licence.

This is beyond extraordinary. Beatty and other pollies are with the highest priority trying to find out what went wrong here. Well of course. We’d expect nothing less. And we expect a head or two to roll when we find out. We also expect this character to lose his licence permanently, or at least for 30 years, given that he has accrued over 30 years’ worth of demerit points!

We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I hear and observe hoon behaviour very frequently. It would not be hard to take the rego number of vehicles and report them…. if the police were receptive to it and some encouragement was given to the public to do this.

THIS is one of the major issues – the nature of the policing regime – as I keep on saying.

Most reluctantly, after several years of making complaints, I came to the very solid conclusion that it is not worth my while going to police with a complaint unless an accident has actually happened, or some very brazen high-risk act of stupidity.

‘Normal’ hoon behaviour, tailgaiting, speeding or aggressive risky driving is just not reportable. This is WRONG. The public needs to be empowered to assist police. For me, this powerlessness factor to do anything about rank driving….when I am willing to take the time to make complaints and full statements….is crippling and enraging.

How can we possibly have a police force that actively (for all intents and purposes) discourages conscientious public from assisting in dealing with dangerous drivers?

Is it any wonder that I hear and see brazen hoon behaviour all the time, with the very small number of police on our roads, and the rank inability for the general public to play a meaningful part?

Just caught Beyond Tomorrow on Channel 7

All about distractions for drivers and the increased chance of having an accident.

Even off-hands mobile phones lead to an average slowing of reaction times of about 0.2 seconds for experienced drivers and 0.3 seconds for young drivers (50% worse). This is thought to be quite significant.

Presumably the same applies with any conversation in a car… and the more vigorous the conversation the worse the effect on the driver.

We are seeing more and more gadgetry in cars, which provides more distractions.

The solution was touted to be regulation of this gadgetry. But it was also expressed that it would be extremely difficult to determine which accessories were too distracting and which were acceptable.

I think they are barking up the wrong tree again (or perhaps barking mad!)

The best way of dealing with this business is driver-training….. with emphasis on safety margins and risk factors.

We cannot eliminate distractions. And any regulation of distracting circumstances is rendered just about useless due to our inability to adequately monitor or police the situation, as has been shown with mobile phones. The policing of in-car conversations would surely be impossible, and yet this is one of the biggest distractions of all.

We need to educate drivers on how to deal with them, by always maintaining healthy safety margins and constantly monitoring risk factors, and make sure they get the message by way of exhaustive testing BEFORE THEY GET A LICENCE, at the next licence renewal for those who have licences, and retested for everyone at least once every five years!! !! !! !! !! !!

I just registered my support for the Qld Govt’s ‘Enough is enough’ campaign on their website, and left a link to this thread.

To the lucky person who looks it up, I make one powerful point - the Qld Govt has GOT to stop the duplicity over speed.

What duplicity you ask? The duplicity of saying that “every k over is a killer”, while allowing us all to do a few ks over!!

We need to know what the speed limit is, and it certainly isn’t what is stated on the signs. It seems that the majority of the time, if not all the time, it is 10ks over. This seems to be acceptable to everyone including the police who won’t book you on the highway and probably anywhere, unless you are doing 11ks over the stated limit.

We need to either have this formally announced, or we need a campaign announcing that speed limits will be policed at the face value of the signs, or something in between, such as a 3 or 5 k leeway.

The bottom line is – the public HAS to know where they stand with speed limits (and various other road rules that aren’t dealt with at face value). Until they do, the police and government are being duplicitous.

They cannot expect to run a highly respected and effective road safety campaign while there are such obvious contradictory elements.

See a new line of road-safety discussion at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4395#40173

I cycle to work about 50% of the time, ~25km a day. Have done for 20 years.

I am thoroughly sick of the number of laws that are unsuitable for cyclists. For example, turning left through a red light, with care, should be perfectly acceptable, as should going straight ahead at a T junction, or the same through a stop sign.

I am even more sick of the lack of general knowledge of the law, as it pertains to cyclists. For example, it is legal to ride on the footpath, but most people think you are an ignorant-of-the-law idiot if you do.

I am even MORE sick of the lack of policing of obvious illegalities regarding cycling, most notably riding at night without lights, or with a red rear flashing light and no front light.

When it comes to cycling the law is a mess.

Despite Peter Beatty’s strong road safety campaign, and the increase in cycling as fuel prices rise, there is ZERO attempt in Qld, or anywhere in the country, to clarify the rules, police the rules effectively, and increase safety accordingly

Just spent five weeks cruising around the Territory and western Queensland. Have noted a few concerns over road safety issues and rules. So here’s the first…

Just drove the Flinders Hwy from Hughenden to Townsville. The speed limit on the open road changes from 100 to 110 and back and forth numerous times. I would love to know why some areas are 100kmh and other 110, on a road that is essentially the same – a good highway though flat and gently undulating country with a low traffic volume. The only areas that I think possibly should by 100 are the windy bits on the Burra Range and the Mingela Range. The latter is 100 with 110 zones on either side, but the former is 110.

I can see no reason at all why any of the other 100k zones should not be 110. It seems to me that there is scant accountability for those who implement the various speed limit zones. With this example, the 100 and 110 zones seem to just be quite random.

Ok, so what if these speed zones alternate?

Two things – it is just bloody hard to come out of a 110 zone into a 100 zone and then keep your speed down, especially if the road conditions are just the same. I found that it took absolute concentration to keep my speed from creeping above the bookable speed, and when my concentration lapsed even slightly… up went the speed into the coppable zone.

Secondly, with the incredible paucity of signs indicating these speed zones, it is very easy indeed to think you are in a 110 zone when you are in a 100 zone, and to get busted for it, or vice versa and wear the wrath of drivers coming up behind for going too slow (by way of tailgating and dangerous overtaking). There are only signs after each siding or small town, which are many kilometres apart

The Northern Territory has an amazing contradiction in its speed zones – no speed limit on most of the open road, but extraordinarily long slow zones on the main road in and on both sides of many towns.

Tennant Ck is a classic. The 80kmh zones on each side of town on the Stuart Hwy are about 50 times longer than they need to be to slow traffic down on the approach to town. 50k zones then start well out on the open road, even though the road is flat straight and a four-lane dual carriageway. This is a grossly over cautionary approach.

I was stopping to look at plants, birds and rocks all over the place. I found that many times when in towns or close to them, I ran the very real risk of exceeding the speed limit after a stop well before I hade reached what I considered to be even the most cautious speed for the conditions.

Again, these absurdly slow zones, that do not match the conditions, are nowhere near well enough signed and are far far too easy for drivers to inadvertently infringe.

Encountered two of my pet hates this evening, in one package as they often are:

1.Chronic tailgating and 2. Stupid and dangerous driving by young drivers who just don’t have a clue about the risks or consequences of their actions.

I actually got a chance to chat this turd when we stopped side by side at the lights. He then proceeded to chronically tailgate several vehicles and dart in an out of traffic and grossly exceed the speed limit for short distances where he could.

So what should I do? I have the rego number, description of vehicle and driver. As a matter of principle I should go to the cops. And I would if I thought it was worthwhile, but as I have expressed previously on this thread, there is no frigging point… because they are not interested in things like that.

But I just might give it another go and assert as strongly as possible that I want my complaint dealt with

Another experience in NT which has cost me a lot middle-of-the-night ponderings:

At Mindil Beach, Darwin, I was chatted by the police for not wearing a seatbelt….on a loop road which is essentially a car park, where a speed of even 15kmh is too fast.

Both of us were going so slow as we approached each other that the cop was able to very easily stop level with me… and proceed to lecture me straight away. He didn’t book me, but neither did he politely or tactfully remind me to put my seatbelt on before I got out on the open road, which is what he should have done if he had really felt the need to say anything at all.

He had just passed a ‘no entry’ sign, having entered the loop road / car park the wrong way. He stopped me only about ten metres past the sign. So he had brazenly ignored one road rule and proceeded to pick me up on the most pedantic point that you could ever imagine. Indeed, I couldn’t have imagined that happening.

I don’t know if failing to wear a seatbelt in that situation is actually illegal, but it was sure as hell not in keeping with the principle and purpose of that particular law, So I would say that the police were wrong to bother with it at all.

The terse manner in which this officer spoke to me reeked of a young cop who felt that he was above the law and could basically offend, abuse or do what he liked with impunity. That was unacceptable. There is no excuse for anything other than a polite and decent approach from the police until they have a very good reason to do otherwise.

The police should have the right to override the law when they need to, but must surely operate within the law at all other times.

continued

I was outraged at the extraordinary contradiction just thrust in my face by the police. So I quickly stopped and went for a run. I have been a runner for years and it is an excellent way to clear one’s head and dissipate anger and frustration. I just happened to run past these two officers sitting in their car at the other end of the carpark. This prompted them to slowly follow me back to my car and then give me the complete checkover.

Now I am of the opinion that the police should be able to do checks that are prompted by suspicious or illegal behaviour. But they should not be able to do checks that are prompted by completely innocent behaviour. I asked them why they chose to check me out after my run and why this prompted a different response to the initial encounter. They said that I had made myself conspicuous. What?

I had not done anything illegal, offensive, cheeky or out of place. They made no suggestion that I had. They didn’t ask me what the run was about at all.

Well, as far as I am concerned, that demonstrated erratic and unjustifiable behaviour from the police, and was unacceptable.

I gave direct confident and polite answers to their questions. My licence, rego and everything else checked out okay. They let me go. But not before the officer in charge said almost apologetically that they were just doing their job regarding the seatbelt. Yes, sure.

continued

Well at least they were cool-headed and polite and they didn’t book me or find some incredibly pedantic thing about my car to cause me trouble over. So I suppose they were somewhere in the middle ground between how they should have behaved and how they could have behaved if they had had the inclination. But.... why can’t the police just behave in the best manner possible all the time?

They certainly presented an awful side of the police, as being just completely above the law and proper procedure, or what you would think would be proper procedure. They demonstrated the most extraordinary discretionary powers, based on nothing. Now while police do have wide-ranging discretionary powers, they need to be very careful about abusing them.

I would also question the legality of their actions on a number of points - driving against a no entry with no good reason to do so, reprimanding me for not wearing a seatbelt in a situation completely off the open road, speaking to me in a far less than polite, courteous, respectful or even neutral manner on that issue, and using a completely benign action of mine to trigger a licence, rego and general check.

Most people have very limited contact with police and it only takes minor interactions that are less than proper to generate very strong feelings. I think it is EXTREMELY important that the police stick to totally tactful, polite and neutral interaction with the public, until they have a very strong reason not to.

Respect for the law and hence compliance depends very strongly on respect for law-enforcers. When the law-enforcers are seen to not respect the law, major problems can and do result

Lahhhhdwiiiig, are you kidding me?

You can’t really be serious about this. Don’t you think that the police have all sorts of crappy things to deal with? Don’t you think that the experience you have just had is really right at the minor end of the scale and not worth worrying about? Don’t you think you should cut them a bit of slack?

Talk about them being pedantic in chatting you about your bloomin seat belt, don’t you think you are being pedantic with your criticism of them? Afterall, you did say that they were cool-headed and that they could have behaved in a much worse manner.

Oow ullow Luddie, me ol’ alter-ego arch-enemy. Long time no chat. Thought you’d dropped off the perch. O well, wishful thinking.

Well, I think my arguments are crystal clear. I have given the police credit where credit is due.

But to clarify, just for you…..

YES I am bloody serious about this. No two ways about that.

Yes the police have all sorts of crap to deal with, but that doesn’t excuse them for one moment from being fully polite and decent to everyone, until they have good reason to take a more forceful approach. Rudeness, or speaking to someone in a belittling manner, straight-up without cause, is just simply not acceptable. There are police who get off on aggressive and intimidatory conversation. My experience reeked of that.

Yes that experience was right at the minor end of the scale. So given the absolute triviality of the issue, why weren’t the police just simply polite and decent about it? Why would they be pig-headed about such an incredibly minor thing? I conclude that it was the power-trip mentality in this instance.

Most people have very rare encounters with police. The occasional interaction can count a great deal towards their perception of not only those specific officers, but also the whole police force. What the police would consider an extremely minor interaction with a member of the public could very well be perceived as anything but minor from the opposite perspective. The police do afterall represent the whole police force of their state or territory, and indeed represent their government as they are public servants, every time they say anything to anyone. And that is how most people perceive it.

There is nothing pedantic about my approach to this issue Luddie. It is very serious. If people in general think as I do, then encounters like this mean a hell of a lot in terms of respect for the law and law-enforcers.

The Nebo – Dingo road, central Queensland, used to be a minor back-road. But with the development of numerous mines and towns in the Bowen Basin coalfields, it has become a highway, every bit as good and as busy as the Peak Downs and Bruce Hwys.

Speed limit – unsigned, therefore 100kmh. Today I sat on 100 to 110 on the stretch north from Middlemount, which is 111km long up to the Peak Downs Hwy. A steady stream of vehicles passed me at great speed. Once they had overtaken me and were travelling at their cruising speed, I matched their speed briefly to determine how fast they were going. Every vehicle was doing 115 to 130kmh.

It became patently obvious that the locals know that the police turn a blind eye to the speed limit on this road. I even passed a police vehicle, which had obviously come past many vehicles doing in excess of 20kmh over the speed limit.

Then, on the Peak Downs Hwy, the story was completely different, with every vehicle keeping it down to at most 110kmh in the 100k zone.

So, here we have another perversion of the road rules and the policing thereof (on top of several that I mentioned on this thread).

Again I ask, what on earth is with the police and their random decisions to allow this sort of thing? Or alternatively, what is it about the police that they feel complete impunity to misuse their discretionary powers to this extent?

And again I point just how little respect normal people have for the law. And that the only thing they respect is what they can get away with.

And again I point out just how hopeless it is for those who respect and obey the law, and even for those who observe the entrenched 10kmh leeway, but who still suffer vehicles coming up very rapidly behind, tailgating and often dangerously overtaking if they get caught up behind you.

Following on from my first post of 29 June:

NO I didn’t go to the cops.

Another incident of the most blatant type, involving a young driver with three of his mates in the car, driving in a totally aggressive and dangerous manner on the Bruce Hwy, tailgating to the max, dangerously overtaking and then slip-streaming a large truck by following it with a one car-length gap at 110kmh for many kilometres…… and I still didn’t go to the cops!

Well, I did actually, to the nearest police stations in both Ayr and Home Hill… but would you believe it, both were closed… at about 2pm on a Thursday!….and there was no notice to say why, or when they would reopen… just locked front doors.

Needless to say, I was and am appalled to the highest degree.

I could have gone to the police further down the road, or perhaps put in a written complaint. But….. the feeling of alienation presented by the police force again outweighed the impulse to do something about an obvious accident looking for a place to happen.

The RACQ is running another survey on what cheese drivers off.

The survey lists a whole range of things under headings such as ‘motorists’, ‘cyclists’ and ‘heavy vehicles’.

But they miss one vital category: police!

The thing that cheeses me off above all others in the policing of road safety. The paucity of police, their blind-eye attitude to many infringements, the policing of others at some arbitrary value that is not the same as the law states - the obvious example being speed limits, and the enormous discretionary powers - that often lead to discriminatory treatment.

Many of the things that piss motorists off are a direct result of grossly inadequate law enforcement.

Working in Brisbane for a couple of weeks and walking home in the twilight, I noticed that every cyclist has a headlight and taillight turned on, from almost straight after sunset.

What a contrast to my home in far north Queensland, where few cyclists have lights at night.

The police just don’t bother with it at all. It’s been like that for years. I’ve seen police vehicles go past lightless night-riders on numerous occasions.

Such is the gross inadequacy of our policing regime…. which is very largely responsible for the grossly stupid behaviour of many cyclists… and many road-users in general.

And by crikey hasn’t it been driven home to this country hick just how absolutely our society is dependent on fossil fuels.

The traffic in this bigsmoke 'Brisvegas' place is outrageous!!

Thank goodness I live in a town where cycling is relatively safe and commuting distances between home, work and just about anywhere around town are only a few kilometres.

There are a lot of cyclists in Brisbane. But by crikey they need to be careful!!

And I take full advantage of the relative cycling ease and safety, and ride to work most days – about 30km return, and have done so about 50% of the time for over 20 years.

And I have the largest red flashing taillight that I could get, along with a dual headlight setup and a head-mounted headlight.

And I ride a fast racer and wear lycra pants and am conscious of my appearance. I am confident that the lights I have are ‘cool’, and not at all daggy!!

Oh you’re my hero Ludwig. You’re so cooool!!

Thanks Luddie, me ol’ alter-ego, you know… at the age of bloody nearly fifty, I reckon I am pretty spunky on me bike, if I do say so meself!

P plates are to be brought back in Queensland, after an absence of 30 years.

There are various other measures to be implemented along with it, such as doubling the learner period to 12 months, restrictions on how many passengers a young driver can have, no motorbike learners permits issued until a person has held a drivers licence for at least 12 months, a complete ban on the use of mobile phones while driving including hand-free kits, and it could include a ban on high-powered vehicles while holding a provisional licence.

GOOD!

But……

None of this is going to come into effect until next July.

Surely, now that these measures have been approved, they simply MUST come into effect as soon as possible. What is the government telling us here …. that these measures are very important…but they are not so important that they can’t wait for almost another year? Come-on!!

Secondly, some of these aspects are going to be hard to police, which will probably mean that the police won’t bother too much with them.

Thirdly, I wonder how significant the penalties will be?

Fourthly, given the probable terrible lack of adequate policing and lack of adequate penalties, I wonder how much of an effect it will have.

Fifthly, will the government will then sit on its hands, saying that it has done its bit to implement tougher measures, when it may well turn out to be no more than a token effort?

All in all, it sounds good at first impressions, but far too little upon greater consideration.

As I keep saying, it is the policing of this whole business that needs to be radically improved, so the chance of being sprung for infringements is high enough to make the vast majority pull their woolly heads in.

No matter what the restrictions, for many people it is a simple case of perceived probabilities; if they think that there is a 5% or a 1% or more realistically, a 0.1% of getting caught, then they are simply not going to take much notice of the letter of the law.

Bloody missing word syndrome. Eeeeeeerrrgh!!

In my last post, it should of course read; “ ….a 0.1% CHANCE of getting caught….”

And again….for goodness sake, it is the bloody policing regime that sits right at the heart of road safety… and which desperately needs reform

Oi Ludwig, guess wot…

You have now put 100 posts on this thread…..you bloomin drongo!

You've been prattling away to yourself since 22 November 2005.

And no one’s listening!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah hahahahahahahahaaaaaaaahaaaa haaahahaaaaaaaaa

Oow you’re a wicked so ‘n’ so Luddles

Laugh all you want, but I intend to keep prattling away to myself… er, um, I mean…putting my thoughts together on this thread…. where they can be accessed by the whole wide world! (:>]

From today’s Sunday Mail…

Brisbane City has a fleet of 60 cars emblazoned with ‘Water Patrol’ insignia patrolling the streets constantly enforcing water restrictions.

These officers have far wider powers than just enforcing water restrictions – they can enforce all council bylaws….and apparently they have been spending a good deal of their time attending to parking infringements and the like.

So why on earth do they have specific Water Patrol signage on their cars??

Why even have council insignia on their cars?

Wouldn’t their presence be considerably more effective if they had unmarked cars?

Now, the same principle should apply with police. Why should their cars be marked as police vehicles? Wouldn’t they be much more effective in reducing road-safety law infringements if they drove unmarked cars….. so that as far as Joe Bloggs was concerned, just about any car could be a police vehicle?

Yeah I know I’ve made this point before on this thread. But sheez, it’s a very important point is it not?

I reckon we could so easily vastly improve the regulation of road rules, and indeed a wide scope of law enforcement if the police went about their business in an inconspicuous manner. Likewise with council bylaw enforcement officers.

Crikey, they don’t even need uniforms. Identification can be produced if anyone questions them…. end of story.

Queensland police are to get expanded powers to seize the cars of hoons and other repeat offenders (Sunday Mail 1/10/06).

Good.

I’ve got no time for hoons or repeat drink-drivers or repeat unlicensed drivers or drivers who drive so recklessly that they lose all their demerit points. If their cars can be confiscated and auctioned off to help pay for law enforcement and public safety, well….bloody good.

However, I feel that it will hardly put a dent in the problems.

The main issue here is that the rank element of our driving fraternity face a very small risk of getting caught, all-considered. If there was a significantly higher perceived risk then much bigger mitigation of the problems could be achieved.

Of course, putting many more police on the streets would achieve that. So would many more police behind the scenes in conjunction will a much-improved facilitation of public complaints, ie empowering the public to do something about law-enforcement, rather than the current situation of, for all intents and purposes, discouraging complaints on matters that are not really serious. But that is not likely to happen

So the alternative is to take police officers out of marked cars and uniforms so that they can meld into the community. If this was done, every second person could be a police officer in the eyes of those who would offend. There wouldn’t be any more mucking around after having checked the scene for the boys in blue. There wouldn’t be any more radio communications to tell others where the cops are on our highways, and so on. Unmarked police officers could very easily identify themselves or their vehicles when required.

We do have some unmarked police, so why not expand the concept? I would love to know why this very simple idea seems to be completely beyond consideration by governments

60% of all photos of law-breaking motorcyclists from red light and speeding cameras were rejected in Queensland in 2005-06 because motorcycles are not required to have front number plates, so could not be identified (Sunday Mail 8 October).

Well, this one just blows my mind completely.

How basic is it for vehicles to be identifiable? Drivers are up for hefty fines for obscured or old and unclear number plates, but our authorities allow the situation to exist whereby bikes don’t even have number plates on one end. They have known for years that this flaw allows bikers to break the law with impunity…but nothing gets done about it.

Many years ago when front number plates on bikes were lawfully abolished, I thought that it was a stupid retrograde step.

So we can’t even rely on our authorities to get the most basic things in place.

Now, I really do object to police who turn a blind eye to unlawful behaviour. http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=99. It seems to me that the quality of number plates is just one of many aspects of road safety that the police generally don’t police. You see lots of obscured or old plates around the place. And you see lots of police cruising around town. But you also see police cars just go on past vehicles with dodgy plates.

So in light of that, I guess its no wonder that the police and pollies allow bikes to go unidentifiable from the front view.

Crikey, it really is gross stupidity at the most basic level. And it just makes a complete mockery of the message from government and police that they are tough on road safety.

Tailgating rage tops anger list.

A new survey by the RACQ has revealed what really drives drivers mad.

Again, for I think the third time, tailgating has topped this RACQ survey, taken every few years.

But still, tailgating, and the aggressive, impatient and dangerous behaviour inherent in it, goes unpoliced.

WHY?? ?? ?? ?? ??

What is with our police?? !!

Tailgating is also responsible for many nose-to-tail accidents, which are the greatest source of motor vehicle insurance claims.

So it is simply unforgivable that it isn’t included in road-safety advertising, campaigns and policing blitzes.

James Cook University has conducted a study running over some five years, which comes to the conclusion that it is not the quality of our roads that leads to most accidents, it is driver attitudes.

Well………..you don’t say!

As obvious as canine testicles if you ask me!

And so it takes me back to my early comments on this thread, in which I expressed the great need for much better driver-training.

I have also suggested that we stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars every year on road upgrades and just keep up basic maintenance and put this huge amount of money into better driver-training and policing.

See relevant discussions on two threads;

Blind-eye policing http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=99

and

Public resentment towards law enforcement http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=165

The Northern Territory Chief Minister, Claire Martin announced today; “The open speed limit for the Territory will end”.

Well….how about that! A bit of basic commonsense at last!!

Red light cameras will be introduced. Fines will be brought into line with the rest of the country and the demerit point system will be introduced.

Currently the Territory has much lower fines and no demerit point system..... and has three times the national accident rate on its roads!

So why on earth weren’t these basic steps been taken years ago?

Oh hold on…. the open road speed limit will be 130kmh, and the default limit (where not signed) will be 110. Now comeon, let’s make it the same across the country. The default should be 100, with a maximum 110 where signed.. or perhaps 120 would be OK on some stretches of the Stuart and Barkly Highways.

One country – one set of road rules.

And yet again we have the completely inescapable f….. c… factor that comes along and just sh..s on every second post that you write. If its not the impossible missing word syndrome its this sort of crap….

"So why on earth weren’t these basic steps been taken years ago?"

Delete that mongrel “been”.

I wish we could easily recall posts and fix the errors…. that appear after you have posted, and simply weren’t there beforehand, after thorough reading, re-reading, re-re-reading, and spell and grammar checks! ):>|

Aaaargh!!

There’s only one consolation – it seems to happen to just about everyone on this forum. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating!!

Oooow…. A bit of a dummy-spit there m’Luddie!

Bloody oath you old chook!

And not before time. I’ve held my vicious tongue for a long time over that issue. It had to be said. It’s just completely maaaaaadening to write a post, which often takes a lot of thought and research, check it as best you can…… and then find freaking typos or grammos or missos (grammatical errors or missing words)!

Pfpfpfpfpfpfpfpffffffff

(: >|

“One of the best things about driving the Benz is the speed limiter” (Sun Community Newspapers 01/11/06).

Alright! Wonderful! Excellent! At last we have a speed limiter that is easily adjustable to whatever the speed limit is. This device prevents you from going over the set speed, unless you really need to, in which case it is overridden if you plant your foot.

What a simple idea.

Speed limiters are not all that new. A few of types have been around for a while. But they need to be very simple to operate so they don't cause a distraction.

So why on earth isn’t every new car from this point forward required to have this device?

Comeon, adherence to speed limits, or to the accepted leeways on stated speed limits is atrocious.

One of the big problems is that drivers either inherently sit right up on the maximum speed that they can get away with or feel pressured to do so in order to roll with the flow. When you are travelling on or close to the maximum speed, keeping your speed from going over the policeable limit from time to time is extremely difficult, in fact bloody impossible, as I have expressed on this thread in no uncertain terms.

So surely speed limiters, which are as easy to adjust as the Benz type, and which don’t cause a distraction to the driver, but rather just fit perfectly well into your pattern of driving, MUST BE IMPLEMENTED across the board!

Fixed speed cameras are going to be introduced in Queensland at the end of next year (Sunday Mail 5 Nov).

Good. It’s about time!

But why a year hence? Surely they can be rolled out a lot sooner than that!

Comeon, if it’s worth doing in order to reduce the accident rate, then it’s worth doing as soon as possible…..surely!

Of course a few other things need to happen along with it (which aren’t gonna happen, are they!);

much better signage of speed limits, so that there can be no doubt about what speed limit zone drivers are in at any given time,

notification of exactly what the leeway is on speed limits, both with respect to these cameras, and in general across the state, in all speed zones,

a highly publicised message that errors in speedometers will be no excuse for exceeding the limit. The accuracy of a speedo is the responsibility of the driver, and if the driver doesn’t know the accuracy, then they are highly advised to err well on the side of caution.

and another highly publicised message that drivers should drive at a few k below the limit (or below the leeway or policeable limit), because it is easy for your speed to creep over the limit if you are sitting right up close to the limit all the time.

So, good steps continue to be made in Qld…….

But I am still getting the feeling that it is little more than dancing around the edges of the whole road-safety issue.

Hey Ludwig you lunatic, do you realise that you have been on this forum for 12 months today?

You’ve put up nearly 1000 pieces of utter drivel, about 170 of which have been on road-safety and closely related stuff.

What an almighty loony you are!!

Luddie, my ol’ alter-ego…. you’re a sick puppy!

All you do is sit on the couch, guzzle beer and eat potato chips, and watch CSI and all that sort of inanity!

Get a life you ol slacker.

Get your backside onto OLO and become a contributor like me, for the good of our quality of life, society and environment….. and stop being such a negative old fart!

Huuuwaaa….Ludwig, ol buddy ol mate, you are right…. I am a negative slack ol twat.

Hey, congrats on 12 months of lobbying, on all sorts of things, but most particularly on the most important issues of all – sustainability and population stabilisation. Wonderful effort.

I notice that you have picked up a lot of support on many threads pertaining to this sort of environmental message, the sort of support that you just weren’t getting before you came onto this forum, despite your many years of this sort of lobbying. That’s really good to see.

Great effort too on road safety issues.

Cheers buddy

See another line of discussion on road rules and the like, started by that inimitable genius Ludwigius;

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=231#4186

And this makes 1000 posts on OLO!

Well done Luddie!
.
.
.
Now for goodness sake, go get a life!!

Alright, I went and tried to get a life, but it didn’t work… sooo I’m bayaaack on the ‘Putting the brakes on the road toll’ thread to talk to myself for another year…or three……..or ten !! (:>()

This week the north Queensland Mayors were in the news whingeing about the state of the Bruce Highway in light of road closures during the recent big wet.

Well I say that they (or was it just Townsville Mayor Tony Mooney with minimal support?) should get their priorities straight.

The Bruce Hwy is pretty good as main roads go, thankyou very much. And it doesn’t get cut very often or for very long. It is vastly better than it used to be, after some pretty massive expenditure of taxpayers’ money and many years of constant hold-ups due to roadworks.

What they should be calling for is a vastly improved policing regime of all things related to road safety. This road is bloody dangerous with frequent fatal accidents, which are NOT due to any shortcomings in the road, but predominantly to drivers just doing stupid things…. and taking themselves out and taking innocent people with them.

The policing regime is only slightly better than completely hopeless, with a blind eye being turned to tailgating, dangerous overtaking and other aggressive and impatient behaviour, and just about everything else except speeding.

We could go a long way towards improving this situation with one simple change - if all police cars were unmarked, so that in the eyes of offenders, any reasonably new car on the road could potentially be a police vehicle, a huge increase in law abidance would ensue.

Comeon you economic-growth-at-all-costs Mayors of the north. How about not just sitting back and accepting the disgusting ongoing road carnage in our part of the world, and actively doing something about it.

The same applies across the country.

Hoons in Hyundais. Now there's a phenomenon!

With regard to road work signs and temporary speed limits. Under the federal road act, it is illegal for temporary road work signs to remain in place [ or not covered up ], to be enforced when there is no evidence [ machinery or men] in the act of actually doing road work [ including lunch break ] on the carriageway where the signs are posted. Heavy penalties apply. THIS is what cheeses drivers off. If the department of main roads enforced their own rules about signage, things would go well.
Secondly, it is illegal to post speed signs that - change the speed by more than 20KPH in one step...EG, off ramp speeds that quote 70KPH or lower from a road that is posted as 100KPH are ILLEGAL if these signs are in red and white - off ramp speeds are recomended [ yellow and black ] and are NOT enforcable.

Pepper, yes it would nice if the damn Main Roads Dept and councils observed the rules in this regard, wouldn’t it!

So often I see pretty haphazard efforts at roadworks signage and pretty unintelligent attempts to make it as safe and as clear as possible.

One point – it cannot always be illegal to leave temporary signs in place when no work is actually being done, if the hazard or changed road conditions remain.

As I stated way back on this thread, I made a whole series of written complaints about the inadequacy of roadworks signage and safety a few years back….. and of course it went nowhere!

The other major issue with roadworks and associated signage is the complete lack of policing by the relevant authority. They seem content to have cars whizzing past at 20kmh or more faster than the temporary signs indicate, and no doubt in many instances they put up signs with that in mind, which indicate a speed far slower than is necessary.

See a new line of discussion; ‘Staying alive on the road’

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=462

Alright Ludwig you old fart. I have been hanging out for a whole torturous week for you to elaborate on your weird little post; “hoons in Hyundais. Now there’s a phenomenon”.

What aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaare you on about?

Ahaaaa Luddie! You ARE out there keeping an eye on my rabblings, you sly dog!

Welcome out of hibernation, me ol’ alter-ego mate

Luuuudweeeyiiig

Tell me what “Hoons in Hyundais” is all about, or I’ll come over and throttle ya

Oooow dear! Alright Luddo you agro old prick, um I mean, prickly customer, I’ll tell ya, seein as you is so pushy n impatient n all.

Well you see, I have this friend who drives a small Hyundai XL and raves about his hooning antics. He proudly boasts of his long history of hoonery, which continues at age 68.

More next time.

Ludwig!! !! Another week has gone by! Pull your finger out buddy!

My friend boasts of his hoonery on a very regular basis, especially his drags with fellow hoons from traffic lights and his fast tight cornering.

He gets very regular takers for a drag, despite the antithesis of a hooning image presented by his car and by the driver....or maybe because of it!

All I can do is shake my head when he goes on about this stuff. He seems to find great entertainment in my negative reaction, and he clearly gets huuuuge enjoyment out of driving in this manner!

He has been driving like this for 50 years and has apparently never come unstuck or been copped for it, which I must say is truly remarkable.

He says to me that I’m a fool for basing my exercise regime around barefoot running and hiking several times a week, and that sooner or later I’ll come to grief because of it. Well, after six years I haven’t, not in the slightest. But yes, it could happen. It is a calculated risk. Even the worst consequences are only going to concern me, and not inconvenience or harm others.

So I’ll say the same to him; sooner or later he will come to grief from on a patch of loose dirt or oil on one of his tight cornering manoeuvres and plough into an oncoming car. And the consequences will be thousands of times worse than if I ever step on a piece of glass or gash a toe open.

There is just no room for this sort of thing on our roads. It shouldn’t be tolerated in the slightest. We should be concentrating on being careful and erring on the side of caution ALL of the time that we are behind the wheel of a car.

See a new line of discussion (or another attempt to take this whole subject of road safety up to the good caring people on the OLO forum), at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=520

My friend is right into daily exercise by way of running up our local hill or along the river, which are very popular activities in the evenings. But he says that half the fun of this is the drive from home to the hill or river, and the regular hoonery therein!

My point of raising the issue is that this sort of driving behaviour is very common. I witness it all the time and hear it from home, in quiet suburbia, very frequently indeed. It peaks on Friday and Saturday nights, but is present to a fair extent at any time of the day or night.

In less experienced drivers at least, it is no doubt strongly correlated with accidents, injury and death, as well as road-rage and the feeling of powerlessness in the general non-hoon community. It is one aspect of driving that needs to be reigned right in.

So, if we were to develop a much-improved driver-training regime and policing regime and empower the general public to have a part to play in regulatory activities, we could easily deal with the hoon factor…. and make our roads a much safer and nicer place.

See http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=520#10188 and other Ludwig posts on that thread.

Well thaaaanks Ludwig… for fiiiinally telling us about “Hoons in Hyundais”!

I am now certain that you are an old stodge who just wants to deny drivers any fun behind the wheel, and turn driving into some totally boring menial activity.

I can just imagine you saying; ‘driving is about getting from A to B in the safest possible manner, end of story’.

O excuse me for snoring!

Hooooorrghh \:>[

Ludwig, Ludwig. Luuuudwig. Do you really think our streets should be race-tracks, drag-strips or rally courses??

Of cooourse driving should be about getting from A to B in the safest possible manner!

Do you really find driving so tedious that you have to be a hoon or one of these fools who tries to play silly buggers with other drivers or who is so impatient that they aggressively tailgate, speed and change lanes all the time?

Come on, ol buddy!

If you want to liven up the daily commute a bit, then turn on your radio or your favourite music or, and here’s a novel idea; take an interest in the environment around you outside of your car….and enjoy the trip in an unrushed, relaxed and SAFE manner!

Now presumably this little lecture has caused to nod right off!

Blah...

Alright Lud…

That’s clearly the most informative post that you have put on this thread yet!

So are you going to tell me what generated this wonderful pearl of wisdom??

Huh?

Too many young male drivers push their cars as though they are in a V8 Supercar race. They lack the commonsense and maturity to realise that they are on a public road/suburban street not at a raceway.

Just think: all that power under their right foot - but nothing between their ears.

Yeah I’ll tell you Luddie.

It’s really very simple: all the talk in the world won’t improve safety on our roads. And so far all the posts that I have put on this thread haven't amounted to molehill of beans!

So I agree, “blah” is just about as useful as anything else I have written here over the last 18 months.

Bloody depressing I’ll tell ya. Especially when in theory it is all so easy to implement real improvements.

GDay Big Al.

Absolutely right.

This is exactly why we need a vastly improved standard of regulation of road rules. This doesn’t mean vastly more police…it means empowering the community to play their part in law-enforcement by way of making evidence-backed complaints or reports to the police about incidents of significant law-infringement.

It should be taken for granted that the public can do this. But instead, complaints about reckless driving behaviour are not only not encouraged, they are effectively strongly discouraged.

The public feel powerless to deal with rank drivers, which is one major cause of road-rage – leading to people taking matters into their own hands.

I find that being subjected to stupid dangerous sh!t on the roads on a frequent basis and not being able to do a f!cking thing about it is more maddening than any other aspect of my life. I wonder how many people feel like this?

I find it fascinating that the police will treat minor complaints of public nuisance or the like in a very serious manner if someone bothers to report them, even if there is no evidence to go with it, but won’t be interested in reports of highly risky driving behaviour such as chronic tailgating, dangerous overtaking, gross speeding, etc….unless an accident has occurred.

That’s bloody atrocious and totally pathetic as far as I’m concerned

It is particularly bloody depressing Luddie when the road toll in my part of the world – north Queensland, is more than double what it was at the same time last year…… and no one seems in the slightest bit interested in tackling the issue in any manner other than the same old tried and proven INEFFECTIVE ways.

New road rules come in to force in Queensland on 1 July.

They include;

Doubling the minimum learner period from six to twelve months.

Learner licences to be issued at the age of 16.

Learners to be required to record 100 hours of supervised on-road driving experience in a log book.

High-powered vehicle restrictions to apply for young drivers.

Tougher powers for police to confiscate cars from repeat drink-drivers and disqualified drivers.

P plates to be reintroduced, with stronger restrictions on first year probationary drivers (P1) as follows;

P1 drivers can only carry one passenger aged under 21 between 11pm and 5am.

All mobile phone use, including loudspeaker, is banned.

Hands-free mobile use is banned for supervisors and passengers.

These things are more or less in line with RACQ (Royal Automobile Club of Queensland) recommendations, as I outlined on this thread on 19 March 2006 on this thread; http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=2877#36139.

I welcome them. But for goodness sake, why did it take so long??

And where’s the publicity?

We’ve heard only the tiniest bit of information about this in the media. A tiny article appears in today’s Townsville Bulletin (my local paper) on page 9. There is no mention of it in the Courier Mail (Queensland’s main paper), judging by the website.

And quite bizarrely, there is no mention of it on the Queensland Government website under Queensland Road Rules!

Any introduction of new laws has surely got to be accompanied by maximised publicity in the media.

As I said, I welcome these initiatives, but really; they are nothing more than piddling little adjustments around the periphery of the problem of road safety.

What is needed is a full-on frontal attack, implemented nationwide.

Oh what the hell. The public and politicians alike are not really interested. I mean, how obvious is it? – such pissy new restrictions, such minimal interest in the issue shown by newspapers and the media in general and such apparent lack of concern from government about getting the message out there.

Yep. Let’s just continue to live with the road fatality rate and continue to kid ourselves that the current police effort is anywhere near good enough.

Let’s just continue to live with the ‘collateral damage’ of a hopelessly inadequate law enforcement system on our roads, and a hopeless level of hypocrisy in the general community, police force and government about what is illegal and what is acceptable or commonplace behaviour.

Well, I am pretty profoundly disgusted. I started a new road safety thread….and not one of the hundreds of OLO readers saw fit to post a comment!

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=782

It seems that there really is stuff-all concern about this issue in the general community, or even amongst the good thinking people of this forum!