Well I did mean that we were both going down hill and in the same direction!
is Mise,
well that would be nice but reality isn't that ideal. Anyhow, I trailed off the real subject which is fine collecting in an indecent manner.
As for Ludwig's "And for goodness sake, if this is going to change, we need to know in no uncertain manner" I can only support his call.
I find the need to concentrate on my driving is being hijacked by having to concentrate on the idiotic amount of varying speed signs. I mean 50/60/80/40/100/60 etc all within a mere mile or so is nothing short of insane

<< It is a Surrogate tax in place because it can be collected from those who choose to disobey the law. >>

Yes chrisgaff1000 it is certainly a surrogate tax. Or perhaps a scumbag tax would be a better name!

But it hasn’t been imposed on people who have chosen to break the law! It has been imposed on those who have chosen to OBSERVE the law!

The law has effectively been a bit different to what is actually written in law. The speed limit law has effectively been a few kmh over. The police have TRAINED us to observe this law!

This is what practically every good normal conservative driver does. This ‘few ks over’ law has been the accepted real-life law. The technical law, as enshrined in legislation, has NEVER actually applied!

So the police have suddenly started punishing people for doing exactly what they have trained them to do.

It is indeed a SCUMBAG tax!! And those who are perpetrating it on good law-abiding citizens are absolute scumbags. Sorry but there are no two ways about that!

continued

<< Personally, and I am lobbying for it >>

Chrisgaff, I presume you are lobbying for the law to actually be the law and for everyone to strictly observe it.

Fair enough. But it needs to be done properly.

When accepted practice gets out of whack with the letter of the law, there absolutely MUST be a major publicity campaign to inform the public of impending changes to the policing regime, BEFORE the police start pinging people!

I’d like to see the Newman government really tighten up all road rules. Indeed, they should look at all laws across the whole of society, and strive to eliminate the discrepancies between the official law and general practice in relation to all sorts of things.

But crikey, they have GOT to do it carefully and respectfully, so that this of incredibly disgusting bullsh!t about real-world law-abiding people being ripped off and offended in their many thousands doesn’t happen again!

Quite frankly, this is society parasitising itself! I see it as a really dangerous precedent!

It is surely very strongly producing a very bad impression of the police in the general community. We don’t need that. We need to have respect for our law-enforcers and to be able to trust them to do the right thing. I’d say that that has been dangerously fractured here.

<< I find the need to concentrate on my driving is being hijacked by having to concentrate on the idiotic amount of varying speed signs. I mean 50/60/80/40/100/60 etc all within a mere mile or so is nothing short of insane >>

Ah but Indi, we need several changes of speed limit in relatively short distances a lot of the time.

Just imagine if we didn’t have this. If we only had one speed limit zone in situations like this, the lowest speed limit would apply to the whole distance! This would be totally inappropriate and would rile people more than the frequently changing speed limits, wouldn’t it?

Imagine if it was 40kmh for the whole of the stretch where most of it could reasonably be 60, 80 or even 100.

We need to have speed limits that fit with the nature of the road and all other relevant factors, and to NOT have speed limits that are patently too low in some places because they are part of a longer speed zone in which the low speed limit is really only appropriate for a very small part of it.

So I’d go for the opposite to what you desire: more speed limit zones with more changes of speed limit.

The worst aspect of all this is the incredible paucity of speed limit signs!

We need abundant speed signs, including very regular reminder signs so that we can always know what speed zone we are in!

So often you turn into a road and don’t encounter a speed sign for a long distance. You are just left to guess the bloody speed limit!

And so much of the time, you encounter one speed sign at the start of a particular speed zone and then no more signs for a long distance. You often lose confidence of the speed zone you are in and are left wondering whether you have missed a sign.

It’s a really infuriating aspect of driving!

continued

I vocalise every speed sign I pass, whether I’m by myself or with other people in the car when I’m driving, no matter how oddly they look at me! I have done this for years. I find it really helps.

I started doing this because I became enormously frustrated with my inability to always know what speed zone I was in. And jeez, if you think you are in a zone that is 20kmh higher than it actually is, and you are doing the normal 2 or 3 ks over, then you are wide open to copping a fine for doing more 20kmh over the speed limit, which is no small punch in the head!

It is extraordinary that our main roads get line-markings, reflectors on the road, reflectors on posts off the side of the road and all manner of road signs as a fundamental part of their construction. Except… the speed limit signs are practically always extremely thin on the ground, if not entirely absent!

About a decade ago, a section of the Bruce Hwy was completely rebuilt south of Tully. Its construction included 100kmh speed limit signs just past each little side road in both directions and at regular intervals of about ?3km on sections where there were no side roads.

This is the way it should always be, as a fundamental requirement of the road construction job. And yet in my abundant travels all around the country, I have never seen anything else like it.

Ludwig,
Unfortunately the real culprit is the 'art of semantics' or its application.
Police and the common law operate under a shroud of indifference known as "reasonability" or what is reasonable under the circumstances which in turn is defined by circumstance.
Until we have laws and regulations that tell us exactly what we can do there will be no change.\All laws in Australia relate to what we cannot do.