Some would argue that a good driver is one who sticks fastidiously to the law.

I would argue that a good driver considers safety first and the law second, where they are not aligned.

For example: it is often advisable to exceed the speed limit by a little bit in order to do the same speed as everyone else is doing around you, rather than sit right on it or do 5kmh under and be at odds with the traffic flow. If you do this out on the open highway you often get tailgated, overtaken riskily, and experience general discontent from other road users, which is distracting and causes an increased risk to all concerned.

What do you think? Is the law sacred or is there good reason to be a bit loose with it as it concerns speed limits and other driving regulations?

Dear Ludwig,

My husband who's learned to drive in the US and had driven
there for approx. nine years and over 30 years in Australia
agrees with you.

The examples that you gave have been frequently expressed
by other drivers and driving instructors both in the US
and here in Australia.

It's only logical that in the interest of safety - one has to
adapt to the driving conditions (within reason)
surrounding you at any given time.
Frequently sticklers to the rules are a hazard
on the roads and as you pointed out - can cause accidents.
There have been instances when we had to accelerate to go
through an inter-section at the change of lights to avoid being
rear-ended as had happened to us once.

I agree Ludwig and have often been bought back to my 13th year and first real teacher about driving.
He said we learn every day or give it away.
Petrol head me , keeping space between me and others for self defense and speeding a little if it takes that.
Pet hates!
Drivers pulling out in front when you are at speed then slowing while watching in mirror to see if you hit them.
Me moving to right lane,only after being sure it is safe to, so merging blocked traffic can come in from side road.
Goose over takes on inside honking horn!
Good thread.

A single car on the road, and the chances are this vehicle will be doing 5 k's over the speed limit.
This happens because it is known police have a calibration tolerance.
This tolerance is wiped out by thinking your speedo is not one of the dodgy ones.
A little bit over is not what it supposed to be about.
60 means 60 not 64, The police should move their tolerance to cut out at 60, so drivers would be more inclined to drive to the speed limit.
The same happens at 100, vehicles travel at 105 until police are spotted, then speed drops to 100.
This says people are deliberately driving over the speed limit, for no other reason than disobeying road rules and filling govt; revenue.

<<Is the law sacred>>

Shocking that someone could even ask such a question so seriously.

The law is a secular institution, created by politicians with grandiose ideology at best and personal interests at worst, those Napoleons who believe that they have a divine right to violently enforce their ideas on others using guns, dogs and all the other technologies available to their police force.

Fear is not scared - Love is!

These pictures sez it all - my driving record is in pic-b, I make no appologies for the caracturisation.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75607346/kippa-ring-cops-pics.zip
You work it out
cheers

I think we should resume the Bathurst track, & use it as a licencing test track.

All applicants for a licence should be allowed one test every 5 years, [definitely no more often], to be judged competent or otherwise. Old V8 super cars, now rather useless things, could be made available for hire for this test, at preferably exorbitant rates.

Any who are unable to lap in 2min 15 seconds, [the 100 MPH lap time, first achieved in 1968], should be failed, & banned from anything faster, or bigger than a bicycle, or perhaps a horse, until they have successfully tested at their next chance.

Survivors of any crashes should be held fully responsible for the cost of any repairs necessary.

Anyone found driving unlicensed should be deported to Tasmania, after first removing all vehicles & boats from the island.

With such a system we could then increase the speed limit to 160Km/H, [which was a legal speed when I got my licence], as most drivers would be competent.

I expect your agreement to this suggestion Ludwig, as it should reduce the population somewhat. Firstly by eliminating many incompetents from the population, then making it much harder for the youth to get together with a place to copulate.

Talk about a win win!

It's a mentality issue that's getting worse the longer we are without a National Service to instill sense & responsibility.
I know many who drive 10 times safer after a six pack than many sober people.
If there were more Police instead of so many Coppers the road user community would be a much happier & safer one.

579, you wrote:

<< The police should move their tolerance to cut out at 60, so drivers would be more inclined to drive to the speed limit. >>

I’d have no problem with that, just as long as they launched a major publicity campaign first so that everyone knew about it before it came into effect.

Whatever the case, the police have SURELY got to tell us, the general public, just exactly what they are policing! If right on the official speed limit, then fine, if 3 or 5 or 10ks over, no worries, .just as long as we know what the bloody hell they’re up to!

The policeable limit in Queensland has for a long time been 10kmh over – you wouldn’t get booked unless you were doing at least 11kmh over the official limit. Now that seems to be different in some circumstances, but we’ve heard nothing in the way of publicity about it.

So the cops have led us to understand that the real limit is ten ks over what the signs say, and then out of the blue they start booking people for doing 5 or 8 ks over. Now THAT is DESPICABLE!!

It reeks of revenue-raising!

In this state 60 means 60. What else can it mean. Police with number plate recognition catch drivers with unpayd fines as much as 40,ooo $.
Serial offenders, speeding or drunk, should never be allowed on the roads again.
Drivers that consistently drive in the right hand lane for kilometers on end for no reason, and drivers that put their blinker on after they have made a move.
Lazy drivers that can not steer a car moving over solid lines and cutting corners on intersections.
The said revenue raising, does not exist, Do the right thing and you will not be fined.
You get 40% off license renewal for a clean record.
If a policeman tells you to stand on your head, that is what you do without question.

<< Do the right thing and you will not be fined. >>

But 579, we need to know what the right thing is!!

Read the opening post – if you do the right thing by the letter of the law out on the open highway, you can actually be more of a hazard than if you do the safest thing! Is the safest thing not the right thing, especially when the policing regime allows you to not fastidiously stick to the speed limit?

Given that the cruising speed is almost always right up there on or just over the speed limit and perilously close to the bookable speed, we absolutely need to know exactly where we stand with the law. That is: exactly what the police are policing. And we need to know that it is consistent across the board.

<< In this state 60 means 60 >>

No it doesn’t. Not in any state. No one gets booked for doing 1 or 2 ks over.

<< If a policeman tells you to stand on your head, that is what you do without question. >>

If the policing regime was consistent and well elucidated, then yes, maybe. But a sloppy variable policing regime with speed limits and all sorts other stuff, and the huge discretionary powers of the police which mean that different parameters are policed in different places or even by different officers in the same town, is just crap…and really does corrode respect for the police and the law.

Here’s another example of hypocrisy in law that I raised on OLO a while back, and which resulted in a very good discussion: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1976&page=0

Haaa haha Hasbeen.

Crikey, you’re and old HOON!

( :>)

There are drivers and drovers, good bad and ugly.
And the act its self is very different.
City driving is one thing express way or open road another.
I speed, the thought that those who do are criminal, or cause more smashes is weird, every one speeds now and again.
Swapped the big six 4x4 fora Suzuki Jimny, great toy.
Speed? 110 if dropped from an airplane.
But yes in slower zones it is safer to make clean air around you.
Driver training courses need constant updating.
Road workers know in school holidays death is never far away, saying the kids are driving at that time,or school teachers.
What they actually think is the joy of holidays has seen some drivers leave the brain at home.
Surely some of us can tell story's of slow cars just managing to over take a massive truck at the top of a hill.
Then slamming the breaks on just sitting under its bull bar all the way down.
First and often fatal mistake, putting your trust in another driver.
Drive to survive.

Some just don't grasp the basics. They'll defend their right to be a nuisance to the end. Stay left and go with the flow. Everyone travels at around 105. They just do. If you've got a problem with that either stay left AND ON 100 or don't go on the motorways. You deserve to be abused if you're in the right lane trundling along like an old fart driving a volvo. GET OUTTA THE WAY.

I noticed someone mentioned 60km/hr zones. They're different as they are in populated areas. No one has an issue with doing smack on 40, 50, 60, 70, or 80 as these speeds exist to protect pedestrians or road workers. But the highway is something else.

<< But the highway is something else. >>

Yes StG the highway is different to built-up areas. But what is really different is roadworks zones. Now they are something to behold!

Very few people lower their speed to anywhere near the temporary low speed limit right through roadworks zones or only approximate the signed 40 or 60kmh right in the actual work area and not in the lead-up or lead-out parts of the zone.

Time and time again when driving on highways all over the country, I’ve been in a line of traffic that is happy to sit on 105 and maintain respectable gaps between vehicles, and slow to 80 and 60 in the towns, but which just treat roadworks temporary speed limits with total disdain!

I don't have much sympathy with the nanny state. Our current speed limits are one obvious expression this affliction that has overtaken our lives.

In the 60s, driving the rather agricultural cars of the day, on the very agricultural roads, I regularly averaged 70 miles per hour from Sydney to Melbourne/Brisbane over night, towing a 1.5 ton trailer. On the long straights in Victoria I would regularly be passed by semi trailers. Believe it or not, I did not have accidents, & as you can see, I survived.

In 68 General Motors gave a few of us pre production models of the 327 GTS Monaro, the Bathurst model, with instructions to "break them if you can". They wanted any weaknesses found before the big race.

On the same overnight interstate runs I would often average around 80 MPH in those Monaros. Even then the semi trailers were passing me on those long Victorian straights.

Today on vastly improved roads, in the much better cars, we are told it is "dangerous" to drive at over 100, or occasionally 110Km/H. They even have the hide to claim that "every kilometer over is a killer".

Now I don't know what it takes for some of you to be insulted, but I find this cr4p highly insulting. If they were a little honest they may say that my neighbour is unsafe over these limits, & that is possibly true. True but only because those speeds take so little concentration, that drivers are likely to fall asleep, or be busy texting as they go.

Yes I should be dead some say, but I last had an accident on the public road in 1960, & even that was the other blokes fault. Perhaps speed isn't quite as dangerous as they reckon.

It’s a very good point Hasbeen – speed limits are often just patently too low!!

Of course, they’re set on the cautious side, but often ridiculously too much so.

A couple of pet hates:

50kmh zones on main roads in some towns, where they are flat, straight and just the same as 60 or even 80kmh zones elsewhere. This I consider to be a total perversion of the introduction of 50kmh as the speed-limit-in-built-up-areas-unless-otherwise-signed a few years back.

and

Absurdly long zones on highways leading out of built-up areas, and out of roadworks zones, where you are obligated to do a stupidly low speed.

There is this crazy requirement for the speed limit to be the same on both sides of the road!

Yes we need a slow speed limit leading into build-up areas and roadworks zones. But for goodness sakes we don’t need it leading out of them!

On the lead-out, the speed limit should not have to be the same as it is on the other side of the road!

I noted in WA last year that there are many minor back roads with lots of curves and hills with 100 or 110kmh speed limit, on which you are really battling to get up to that speed. It is almost like saying that there is no speed limit!

It seemed to be so totally at odds with the super-cautious approach I’ve seen in various places in other states.

But it apparently works for them, with no increase in road fatalities as far as I’m aware.

And 130kmh works in the NT. Indeed, there appears to be a strong call to remove this speed limit and go back to no speed limit at all on the highways, and very little call to lower it.

So yes, I agree Haz: there is plenty of scope around the country for raising speed limits…. and doing so with no or insignificant reduction in safety.

I too agree with hasbeen lets face it I too am a petrol head and at times in the past raced a bit of road on track.
speed in the right hands is not dangerous.
Cars may have auto gears and the lazy fools ability to set speeds but the driver is in control.
And of the car that may run in to you.
Defensive driving is the best way.

By blowing the speed limit you are forcing better detection gadgets.
The loudest screamers of revenue raising are people who constantly speed. 100 means 100 not 105. That is a blatant disregard for the road rules.
The new radar guns can pick out a vehicle from 2 km's. These are in highway patrol cars and choppers.
The tapes buried in the road 1 km apart, every vehicle is photographed when crossing the first tape, and matched when crossing the second tape.

Hi Ludwig,Lexi & Belly,
I agree that sometimes people need to drive to the conditions of the road/traffic. Western Australian drivers, particularly in the City of Perth, are notorious for speeding.
I find that the blatant disregard for road rules by drivers of all ages, is a major cause of serious accidents resulting all too many times, in death.
Police need more power with which to arrest the "rogue drivers". These people run the risk of injuring, maiming and killing others who share the road. A matter of attitude is at fault, particularly with young males.
In my humble opinion, should a P plate driver be caught breaking the law (road law that is), should have their license recinded immediately, until such times as they can drive with respect to the law and other road users. My heart goes out to the parents of children who have been killed or seriously maimed in senseless road accidents, which could, in a lot of instances, have been avoided.
I don't have the answers, but there needs to be a bit of tightening up regarding motoring law-breakers.
Cheers guys,
Noisy Scrub Bird.

NSB welcome back
If we drive according to the conditions we will be better for it.
So very often at a fatal scene you will find the driver had his/her most loved property on board the family.
And bought about the whole thing by not doing just that.

Hi Noisy

Perhaps the biggest problem of all is the thinness of the thin blue line!

So few police; such little chance of getting caught. Idiots feel as though they can get away with all sorts of dangerous antics on our roads, witnessed by lots of people, just as long as the police don’t see them.

And they aren’t far wrong!!

ALL police cars need to be UNMARKED!

I totally disagree with the idea of making police vehicles highly conspicuous, because they can be seen from a mile off which gives idiots a chance to pull their heads in, and they demonstrate just how light-on the police presence is overall.

Unmarked cars can be instantly turned into conspicuous police vehicles with red and blue flashing lights and alternatively flashing headlights.

If every late-model car was a potential police vehicle in the eyes of the bloody idiot and hoon fraternity, then I reckon they’d be a whole lot less likely to carry on as they now do.

Coupled with this should be the empowerment of the average citizen to do something about dangerous and unlawful driving. In my experience which includes many complaints to the cops over a period of several years, they just don’t want to know!! !!

This is extraordinary, and totally hopeless!

Any other little thing, in line with neighbourhood watch or littering, etc, etc, reported to the police will result in them acting. But speeding or tailgating or even considerably worse offences … forget it!

We need more police, but we need a whole lot more of them behind desks encouraging the public to report dangerous driving and following up on these complaints.

The whole community should be empowered to be involved in policing, not just the little band of boys in blue!

One thing that I am very pleased about is that some countries and their nationals are not afforded the privilege of having their international license being converted without testing.

I have a good mate from primary school days who lost his lovely young Mrs in a car accident and it gives rise to the occasional chill up the spine from time to time as my wife currently studyies the road rules.

I note with interest that here in W.A. we are legally obliged, if I do not misinterpret, to keep up our "road rules" study on an ongoing basis. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that the rules change from time to time, as does our understanding of substance and the science of relevant matters, including the relative accuracy of measuring devices, and thus the current need for +/- 5kmh allowance.

Of course, we are expected to adjust our driving to suit the conditions, within reason. So for example, when I come along some of the local streets on my way, with cars banked up and parked on both sides and with kids running amock, notwithstanding the speed limit of 50kmh, I will often probably be doing closer to 30kmh.

As a previous holder of a unrestricted pilot's license, the fact that medical records and transport aren't data matching at inception is a concern of mine, as is the contempt of some who refuse to report their condition/s.

Additionally, pilot's are required to obtain an endorsement per type of plane, and when it comes to some of the larger and faster vehicles, I think the same should apply. I note that we have this graduation for some types, for example the 250cc+ category for motorbikes.

My Mrs said to me recently whilst looking at a sporty:

" ..ROOOOOOM! ROOOOOOM! ...
(nudge, nudge, wink, wink)

to which I replied:

" ... No way baby - putt, putt dulu (intially/ from the start) ... "

and get some experience in controlling the machine under a variety of personal and environmental conditions first.

As for a pet hate, I frequent one particular intersection off a highway waiting to turn right on a regular basis, and sometimes, barely 3 cars get through before it changes, so slow are some people to get moving. It often leaves me wondering how quickly some of these doddering twits would be able to react in a hazardous situation.

..

Certainly the faster we go, the smaller the momentary lapse needs to be in order to end up tragically.

..

Another mate, whose wife and child are also new Australians said something to the effect of:

" Jesus! I thought I was on a winner when they just converted my wife's license but how many times now has she come home upset from road ragers, rude signs, grimaces and verbal abuse etc ... "

Limited Australian english, doesn't really understand the differences in the rules between here and there, different signs and all of the rest of it. There certainly are some gaping holes i.m.o. in what is otherwise quite a good system.

Dream On, I don't think the power or size of your car has much effect on safety, except that big ones handle trees better.

I have a couple of powerful cars. Apart from their ability to overtake quickly, & tow trailers, they do everything about the same as the smaller car. It is the loose nut behind the steering wheel that counts.

My kids are a good case study. Eldest daughter, a good eventer & show jumper. She would plan every stride her horse took, & drives the same way. Even as a beginner driver, she would see that dog 100 metres ahead, & be ready for any action it may precipitate.

Son, good tractor driver at 12. Into speed events, & a good go kart driver. He would see the dog, but it took a couple of years, & a couple of minor bumps before he started to consider how its behavior might effect him.

Youngest daughter, painter, photographer, a car is just transport. She would, even today, be blissfully unaware of the dog, busy with her phone, CD or radio. She still collects scrapes & scratches at about one every couple of months. She is too disinterested to be a good driver, ever.

So stop being unkind Dreamer, give your lady that vroom vroom car. She will be more careful of it, if she loves it. Being careful not to damage your car is a pretty good way to avoid damaging yourself. Perhaps that is where the art comes in.

I think I am a bit like hasbeen I have driven very fast, often.
But too have been a bit naughty.
A road workers job is never ever safe.
Our factory floor is your play ground.
Put twenty, thirty if you want, signs out restricting speed warning.
And still an elderly gent or lady will drive around every cone every sign and drop in to the deep hole you have dug.
On such a day a police motor cyclist ,well known and liked stopped for smoko.
He was a Christian and a gentle person.
Horrified! and shocked as trucks flew past at double,even more the speed limit he said *I they can not see my bike*
He moved it in to sight and came back for his cup of tea.
Traffic slowed,radio had warned them.
After smoko I said pitty you could not hang around for a while,
He said well just for a bit.
I had our truck move and the first truck was 80klm over the limit 60!
He mounted his bike and it took 57 klm to catch that truck.
Some drivers are their own worst enemy.

There is so much more that I’d like to express about the art, or the skill of driving.

And I will, in future threads.