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The Forum > Article Comments > The limits of law > Comments

The limits of law : Comments

By Katy Barnett, published 22/1/2010

A good law has to set up a system of incentives to make people keep it along with disincentives to stop them breaking it.

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Robp, you wrote;

<< …whenever they draw a firm line in the sand, there will always be those that go right up to it… >>

Yes. But wouldn’t it be better to have one firm line that the vast majority of drivers observe, rather than effectively having two lines or a range of speeds that drivers observe?

On our highways, there is a 10kmh leeway. It is patently obvious (in my part of the world at least) that all vehicles including big trucks are allowed by the highway patrolling speed-camera-wielding police to do 110 in a 100 kmh zone.

So you’ve got the type of driver that can’t help himself but to push it to the limit of what he can get away with and you’ve got the driver that observes the law and drives 10kmh slower. You’ve effectively got two speed limits for the same road!!

That creates conflict which translates into tailgating, dangerous overtaking, intolerance, road rage and just generally more chances of mishap than there needs to be.

It would surely be MUCH better if the police just declared what the actual policeable speed is, preferably being the same as what the signs say.

We’d then have much less discrepancy in speed between drivers, and law-abiding drivers wouldn’t feel as pressured to speed up or drive faster than they want to in order to roll with the flow and reduce the chances of having tailgating and other risky behaviour and unpleasantness imposed upon them.

Vagueness with something like speed-limit policing is grossly sloppy and irresponsible, IMO. Especially when it would be so simple to eliminate it.
Posted by Ludwig, Monday, 25 January 2010 12:29:06 PM
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Ludwig,

>>So you’ve got the type of driver that can’t help himself but to push it to the limit of what he can get away with and you’ve got the driver that observes the law and drives 10kmh slower. You’ve effectively got two speed limits for the same road!!<<

It boils down to people being reasonable in how they drive on the roads. Trouble is you can't write a law that makes people drive reasonably.

Maybe the only solution is to have speed limiters in cars. Some sort of wireless gizmo that detects what the speed zone is and automatically caps the car's speed at that. Maybe also have a manually-operated 5-10 km/h booster that allows one to overtake if necessary.
Posted by RobP, Monday, 25 January 2010 2:14:21 PM
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Nice airing of some very important issues, Legal Eagle. When you get your druthers (and presumably drop the anonymity), the first people you should start educating are our politicians, who often behave as though the answer to every problem is a new law, and the response to every misdemeanour is harsher penalties.

On the issue of anonymity, I think it's great that OLO is a space where ideas are more important than personalities. If OLO's editors decide that an opinion can be published anonymously, then it's their decision, and not something we need to get excited about.

However LE, I'd be interested to hear your views on the interplay of legal professional standards and anonymous publishing. After all you're not here as an engaged amateur, like the rest of us. You're a legal professional, writing on legal issues.

In your professional life, how can those you arbitrate over, prosecute or represent know about the matters on which you have already published a view? From the point of view of professional ethics, or when identifying a conflict of interest, is there a difference between an anonymous or non-anonymous view? Choosing to be publicly intellectual has its costs as well as its rewards - do other named legal bloggers have an opinion about you exempting yourself from the costs, relative to them?
Posted by woulfe, Monday, 25 January 2010 10:02:11 PM
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If it was a NSW Lands Act with the Caveat; an archaic 1901 Act that in this century has loopholes all through it [past experience losing 750,000 as a result of crooks using it]. Obviously the Act has not been updated since 1995 despite my opposition to the clauses. I completely comprehend your frustration [Mrs Jennings]
Posted by we are unique, Monday, 25 January 2010 11:59:34 PM
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<< It boils down to people being reasonable in how they drive on the roads. >>

Rob, we are always going have unreasonable drivers. There only needs to be a very small percentage to make it a real problem.

But doing 110kmh in a 100kmh zone if the police are going to let us is not unreasonable. To drive according to the speed signs and make sure that you don’t exceed 100 on the same road is not unreasonable either. And for each group of drivers to feel annoyed by the other IS not being unreasonable. So conflict can be generated where there is no lack of reasonable attitude from anyone!

Conflict is not reasonable. So a lack of reasonabliity can be generate amongst reasonable people due to the ambiguous or duplicitous state of the law!

If everyone understood that there was one speed limit on any given stretch of road, it would certainly help, all else being equal.

<< Trouble is you can't write a law that makes people drive reasonably. >>

I reckon you can improve ‘reasonability’ a lot, by making speed limits and other road rules unambiguous...and by making them fit the conditions more effectively which is another major problem with speed limit signage, especially where slow zones are often just far too long, on either side of roadworks or small towns on the highway, for example.

Of course, much better policing would also help drivers to drive in a more reasonable manner as well. And there are many ways of doing that without significantly increasing the numbers of police.

I don’t think we need fandangled technofixes, although some of them would no doubt help.

Just tidying up the basic elements of road law and its enforcement would go a very long way towards improving road safety.
Posted by Ludwig, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 8:48:54 AM
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Ludwig - now that you've well and truly outed yourself at the Agmates forum, I'm wondering why it is that you choose to continue posting under a pseudonym here?

Your road rules hobbyhorse seems to me to be far less contentious an issue than the AGW stoushes that you're embroiled in at Agmates under your real name, so what's the point?
Posted by CJ Morgan, Tuesday, 26 January 2010 9:38:07 AM
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