Reconcile this garbage.

[Kitdy]

Originally Posted by csl177

The USA's most serious issue is poor and inconsistent driver training. It's not regulated nationally, but by each state, and every one has different standards and requirements. Coupled with the popular misconception that driving is a right, the proliferation of electronic media as daily distractions and just idiotic self indulgent behaviour behind the wheel, it's small wonder that crashes are VERY common in certain demographic groups. Excessive speed is rarely the sole culprit.

In what country will you hear a motorist saying that they have quality and consistent driver training?

My personal non-scientific experiences driving in North America have shown to me that we may well be the safest and most courteous drivers in the world.

That being said, driver training is still inadequate.

[crisis]

Originally Posted by csl177

Three questions... Is there a powerful insurance lobby in Australia? Is licensing a national issue or by state (as in the USA), and what is the level of driver training?

I guess a fourth question would be about culture... is driving a car thought of as a right or priviledge?

Actually we are told driving is a privilege. This is to justify the arbitrary way laws are made and enforced.

Originally Posted by MilesR

There is also the psychological element: I believe that drivers only expect obstructions to occur on the road. They do not expect anything that is not on or obviously near the road to be able to interact with them. It creates a false impression that there is adequate time to respond to any hazard, and that if the road is clear now, no hazard could emerge within the next few seconds.

This. People drive in a world of their own and trust that other drivers will do the right thing. I implore my kids to expect all drivers are trying to kill them. Expect other drivers to disobey stop and give way signs and never trust traffic light intersections. Basically open your eyes and look around. This runs up against the almost continual necessity to watch your speedo in the ever changing posted limit environment we drive in here.

Originally Posted by MilesR

I am very firmly of the opinion that "Don't speed and you won't get fined". It is that simple.

No, that’s too simple and it alleviates the authorities obligation to make sensible laws and post fair speed limits.

Originally Posted by MilesR

I believe that there is a contradiction in Crisis' opinion that there is no connection between attention and speed. If a driver is paying attention, they should be aware of their speed. If they are creeping over the speed limit, they are most likely not paying full attention.

We have the following speed limits in South Australia. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110kmh. We have the following regularly occurring on metropolitan roads. 25 (road work zones and some local council zones) , 40 (road work break down speed and some council areas), 50 (roads designated not to be “main roads”.) This is where most of the problem occurs because there appears no reasoning to some of them and this is also not surprisingly where the majority of sped traps are set. And 60 ks which is supposed to be main roads. Now to ensure you “don’t speed so you don’t get fined” you must be watching for posted limits each time you turn a corner and even as you travel on a straight section onto a part of the road deemed to be too dangerous to travel on at 60 kph. Further to this up until a few years ago it was ok to drive on the 50k roads at 60 with less cars with airbags, ABS and wholly lesser safety features.
To my way of thinking we should be paying attention to the other drivers and potential hazards. This has to be more important than if someone is doing 55k in a 50 zone. Seriously.

Originally Posted by MilesR

I also disagree that such rules are more for the purpose of revenue than safety. If the intention is to raise money, why has this policy just lowered fines for creepers, and increased demerit points? Wouldn't it be more logical to increase fines and reduce demerit points, to keep more drivers licensed and offending?

this is THE only example of such rationality that has ever been exhibited by the authorities for a long long time. And it is unfortunately outweighed by the cynical placement of speed traps.

Originally Posted by MilesR

I think that the direct benefits of a 5km/h reduction in speed may be small, but there may be significant indirect benefits, if it persuades drivers to pay more attention. If 72% of fatal rural accidents are caused by inattention, this policy may make a substantial difference.

No. That would presume the deaths are occurring at 100 or 110kmh. They don’t say what speed this 72% occurred. I will say it was not 115kmh or even 120kmh. I am happy to be proved wrong. It would be a loss of control at a significantly faster speed or in an inappropriate part of road or as a result of overtaking and head on collisions. You will die in one of these travelling at 60 or 70 if you hit someone travelling at the same speed so saying we will reduce the speed from 100ks to 95 is pointless.

Originally Posted by MilesR

A couple of small points of standards and interpretations: Australia has a culture where ownership of a car and a license is very much considered a right.

Not by the authorities.

Originally Posted by csl177

Driver training in Australia is quite good, but the standard of the drivers depends partly upon the rigour of the license examiner, who assesses the learner-driver's skills. Once a license is in hand, however, Australians have a resentment of authority, and respond to any reminder that there are road rules with complaints of victimisation and revenue-raising.

I resent authority because I see the cynicism and obvious revenue raising. If you want to eliminate or reduce head on accidents on country roads (where 72% of deaths apparently occur) build safer dual lane separated roads. Comes at a cost? So the cost is not considered justifiable to save lives. Or place the majority of speed traps in the country. Comes at a cost again of course. Not worth it..
If you want to catch the really dangerous drivers target them. There are several roads in Adelaide where I know and one would expect the cops do that street drags take place. Man them with unmarked Police cars instead of sending out multitudes of unmarked cameras onto the roads to catch out drivers making trifling transgressions.

Originally Posted by MilesR

My interpretation of these laws is that they will make no difference at all to law-abiding drivers, they will be to the benefit of occasionally-inattentive drivers, and detrimental to serially-inattentive drivers and deliberate law-breakers. The safety-revenue justification can be argued interminably, but the laws need to be introduced before we can know whether or not they will work. Then they can be judged and if necessary modified, based on their demonstrated merits.

Unfortunately we will never know if they worked. We will be told the stats they want to tell us and they are meaningless.

Originally Posted by henk4

So yes, speed is relatively and 100 can be very dangerous.

Yep and this is what annoys me with the "Don't speed and you won't get fined" attitude. In this case “speeding” is exceeding the posted limit. TO me speeding is more dangerous when it is travelling at a speed that is unsafe for the road or conditions. I can drive down my street at 50kmh and it is not “speeding” . I consider it to be an unsafe speed due to the width of the street especially when cars are parked. I can however drive unsafely and not “get fined”. I can alternately travel on the South Eastern Freeway at 20kmh above the posted limit quite safely in certain circumstances and be fined. This is the problem with the obsession with posted limits and the illusion that exceeding them is the sole reason for road accidents.

[Cyco]

Originally Posted by Kitdy

In what country will you hear a motorist saying that they have quality and consistent driver training?

My personal non-scientific experiences driving in North America have shown to me that we may well be the safest and most courteous drivers in the world.

That being said, driver training is still inadequate.

I'd say the Scandinavian countries in particular, but also Germany and The Netherlands.

Nth Americans the safest? I havn't been there in some time, but looking at accident/death rates per km I'd say the countries above would be far safer.

[henk4]

Originally Posted by crisis

Yep and this is what annoys me with the "Don't speed and you won't get fined" attitude.

it is the correct attitude if you don't want to get fined. To what extent the same attitude contributes to road safety is something completely different. However chances are greater that when you stick to the posted limts, safety may increase. (but not always and not as a general panacea).

[MilesR]

Originally Posted by crisis

No, that’s too simple and it alleviates the authorities obligation to make sensible laws and post fair speed limits.

By holding a driver's license, you agree to observe the road rules. In a purely legal sense, there is no obligation for the government to allow anyone to drive a motorised vehicle, although that would reduce the demand for licenses somewhat. Likewise, the government has no obligation to make the speed limits as high as people want them to be, as license holders have agreed to drive only as fast as the government allows. If a driver is not able to remain in control of their vehicle, and read speed limit signs at the same time, they are probably not qualified to hold a license. I know that there is a limit to what may be considered reasonable, but I have never had trouble keeping within the speed limits where I have lived, and some of those speed limits were rather odd or unpredictable. If you think that the specified speed limits are unreasonable, you have absolute freedom to not hold a driver's license, and hence not agree to observe the limits.

Originally Posted by crisis

No. That would presume the deaths are occurring at 100 or 110kmh. They don’t say what speed this 72% occurred. I will say it was not 115kmh or even 120kmh. I am happy to be proved wrong. It would be a loss of control at a significantly faster speed or in an inappropriate part of road or as a result of overtaking and head on collisions. You will die in one of these travelling at 60 or 70 if you hit someone travelling at the same speed so saying we will reduce the speed from 100ks to 95 is pointless.

I very much doubt this. Apart from anything else, these fatalities would then not be result of inattention, but rather speed and stupidity, both of which would lend the government more foundation for penalising speed. I expect that head on collisions would account for some such deaths, but I would expect the many would also be single-vehicle accidents, as a result of inattention, or falling asleep. If a car hits a substantial object at 100km/h, the chances of survival are not all that good. A moment's inattention can be enough to drop a wheel off the shoulder, and 100km/h is easily enough speed to fatally lose control when trying to recover, and wrap it around a tree.

Originally Posted by crisis

Not by the authorities.

I know. I was referring to popular opinion. In my experience, the Australian public tends to treat its license as a right, not a privilege.

Originally Posted by crisis

I resent authority because I see the cynicism and obvious revenue raising. If you want to eliminate or reduce head on accidents on country roads (where 72% of deaths apparently occur)

Unfortunately we will never know if they worked. We will be told the stats they want to tell us and they are meaningless.

I do not take the government's words as absolute truth, but I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories, either. What would the government have to gain by fabricating or manipulating the data? Do you deny that traffic accidents happen? If not, why would the government need to manipulate or falsify data to justify measures to reduce accident numbers? Also, I don't think that the report that you posted made any mention of 72% of fatal accidents happening in rural areas. It said that 72% of fatal accidents in rural areas are due to inattention. Statistics should be treated with care.

Originally Posted by crisis

TO me speeding is more dangerous when it is travelling at a speed that is unsafe for the road or conditions. I can drive down my street at 50kmh and it is not “speeding” . I consider it to be an unsafe speed due to the width of the street especially when cars are parked. I can however drive unsafely and not “get fined”. I can alternately travel on the South Eastern Freeway at 20kmh above the posted limit quite safely in certain circumstances and be fined. This is the problem with the obsession with posted limits and the illusion that exceeding them is the sole reason for road accidents.

If you read the material given to learner drivers, you will find that there is copious use of the phrase "when it is safe to do so". Drivers should be able to exercise their own judgement. If the speed limit is 60km/h, then you may not drive faster than that. That does not mean that you must drive that fast. Likewise, I would not expect a sensible driver to maintain 60km/h through a give-way sign, or around a corner, just because it is in a 60km/h zone. Also, it has never been argued that exceeding speed limits is the sole reason for accidents. Otherwise 72% of fatal accidents in rural areas would not actually be due to inattention, but rather speed. Again, this would justify more speeding fines, so why would the government not say it, if it were true? Speed is just a cause of accidents that is easily fixed by regulation, because it is easily measured. I would like to see people fined for inattention and stupidity, but they cannot be measured with a radar yet.

Originally Posted by Badsight

whilst speed is relative, 100 km/h is mind numbingly slow.

its so slow that you dont actually have to pay attention to what you are doing. people show that every day on every continent (also, modern cars handel so good that they virtually drive themselves).

I see this attitude as a problem. 100km/h is not slow, relatively or otherwise, under any circumstances. It is fast enough to kill. The control input and time delay needed to drift off the road at 100km/h is very small, and the consequences of a crash can be fatal. In many places, however, long-distance driving is conducted at about 100km/h, and driving for several hours at any single speed is unexciting. I would not trust a car to handle itself. I would never assume that it is safe to not pay attention to driving, at any road speed. The point of my previous post on this subject was that cars tend to mask the impression of speed, and give a false sense that one is not moving as fast as one really is. I did not claim that 100km/h is exciting. In fact, I said the opposite. I claimed that it is fast enough to be dangerous, in part because in a car, it does not seem exciting enough to be dangerous.

[pimento]

There's two things about accidents being deemed as being speed related - one, it doesn't mean that anyone was actually speeding, and two.. well, it's usually more because someone was being a dickhead. The main problem I have with speed cameras is that they don't stop someone from weaving through traffic and being generally dangerous when it's a busy morning and everyone else is doing 80 in a 100 zone. There are vast stretches of nice, wide, fenced off motorways pegged at 80-100 where the safest thing to do is drive (attentively, obviously) at the same speed as everyone else - and in Sydney, that's usually about 10kph above the limit. The thing is, while I agree that if you get done for speeding it's your own fault, it's pretty easy to spot places where the cameras are placed purely because they want to raise money. Not sure what the solution is really.. if everyone stopped getting done for speeding, they'd have to raise taxes in order to cover the lost revenue. A more fair solution? Probably.. but it'd make them less popular in an election year.

[MilesR]

The situation in Australia is a bit unusual, I think. I have never found anywhere else where the locations of mobile speed cameras are broadcast on the radio traffic reports, so people could slow down in front of the cameras, then disregard the limits everywhere else. This also applies to the stationary rural speed cameras (in New South Wales, I think), with four signs preceding them, just so that you can see them from a kilometre away. This is one reason for my scepticism about revenue raising. Surely if the purpose were to raise money, the locations would be camouflaged, and kept secret.

Unfortunately, speed cameras, red light cameras and breath testing cannot fix all forms of dangerous behaviour. In an ideal world, no-one would drive badly, and the taxpayer would save money on the now-redundant traffic police. Further savings would be made on government medical costs and cleaning up crash sites. I do not think that this is likely to happen soon, unfortunately. There still seem to be a lot of people out there with a burning ambition to drive into a region of space that is occupied by another object.

[henk4]

in france and the UK the driver gets a warning when he is about to meet a (fixed) speed camera. In Holland and Belgium roadusers report the location of mobile speed controls to various radio stations, and these are being brodcasted.
GPS software provides a warning when a speed camera is upcoming, but this is not allowed in Switzerland and more recently also in France. You stand the risk of having your GPS system being confiscated.

[Ferrer]

Originally Posted by henk4

in france and the UK the driver gets a warning when he is about to meet a (fixed) speed camera. In Holland and Belgium roadusers report the location of mobile speed controls to various radio stations, and these are being brodcasted.
GPS software provides a warning when a speed camera is upcoming, but this is not allowed in Switzerland and more recently also in France. You stand the risk of having your GPS system being confiscated.

Here not only are those legal, but radar detector have recently made legal as well (altough there's a bit of discussion regarding wheter they are actually legal or not).

[Badsight]

Originally Posted by henk4

The reason given for this was not that it was no longer considered to be dangerous, but that no figures had been colleted over the past, linking this sort of invisible driving with accidents and it was therefore concluded that the accident rate was about zero....

we have been going thru a bad patch over the last year here with cyclists getting abused smashed & killed out on the roads. a fair percentage NZ drivers are very intolerant towards them

[Badsight]

Originally Posted by MilesR

I see this attitude as a problem. 100km/h is not slow, relatively or otherwise, under any circumstances. It is fast enough to kill..

so is walking. in fact you can walk faster than the speed required to break your neck

100 is dead slow. absolutly. the next time you slow down from 200 you will be amazed at how slowly things happen at 100. in clear weather its too slow to "get surprised" , or "caught out"

its simply unbelieveable that people manage it

Originally Posted by MilesR

The control input and time delay needed to drift off the road at 100km/h is very small, and the consequences of a crash can be fatal.

only if your a brain dead moron. at 100 you have entire seconds in which to react.

Originally Posted by MilesR

I would not trust a car to handle itself.

at 100 cars are safe as houses. modern cars handel like a dream. they track straight & true & have fantastic body control & braking. jump from the first model Mitsubishi Lancer to the current gen - its an entirely different world. it used to be that you had to actually drive the car. now they basically do it for you

obviously im not saying that they actually drive themselves

Originally Posted by MilesR

cars tend to mask the impression of speed, and give a false sense that one is not moving as fast as one really is.

what you just typed there is actually related to crash awearness

meaning : untill you have been in a smash you Dont realise the forces involved. the violence

if it could be included in driver training it would wake people up by an incredible amount to the danger they expose themselves to by driving

but to equate 100 as being dangerous just because the crash at the speed could be fatal is backwards thinking

because the crash shouldnt ever happen in the first place

the speed of 100 is far & away slow enough to dodge, manouver around & stop on the highway.

the critical thing is in having drivers actually care & show personal responsibility by acknowledging its something that requires constant focus

for me, being told X speed is dangerous is as silly as saying certian roads are dangerous

[Badsight]

Originally Posted by henk4

but this is not allowed in Switzerland and more recently also in France. You stand the risk of having your GPS system being confiscated.

thats rediculous

it turns them from a safety device to a revenue device

the whole point of speed cameras is to regulate behaviour. signposted camers work

i have the same grievance towards hidden cameras. they dont exist for safety purposes

[henk4]

Originally Posted by Badsight

for me, being told X speed is dangerous is as silly as saying certian roads are dangerous

this under the assumption that the percentage of morons on the road is zero.

[henk4]

Originally Posted by Badsight

thats rediculous

it turns them from a safety device to a revenue device

the whole point of speed cameras is to regulate behaviour. signposted camers work

i have the same grievance towards hidden cameras. they dont exist for safety purposes

it is not a revenue device. It is a device that punishes people who think they are above the law.

[crisis]

Originally Posted by henk4

it is the correct attitude if you don't want to get fined. To what extent the same attitude contributes to road safety is something completely different. However chances are greater that when you stick to the posted limts, safety may increase. (but not always and not as a general panacea).

True but it’s a sad state of affairs when we are forced to accept cynical laws merely out of fear of prosecution. I accept merely breaking them doesn’t change them of course.