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.