Reconcile this garbage.

[crisis]

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.

I don’t agree with the notion that it is the governments privilege to grant the rights for a person to drive a car they have paid for and will continue to do so on a road they have paid for and will continue to do so. I accept there must be rules and people must be seen as “fit” to be able to do this.

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.

It is reasonable for voters to expect a government be obligated to govern fairly. That would cover all the things you appear to believe governments are exempt from doing.

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.

If the government was sincere about road safety they would make driving less confusing and easier rather than the alternative they appear to prefer. If civilization were to have adopted your attitude toward misused authority I guess we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

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.

You are free to doubt what you like. The problem is we are not really presented with accurate meaningful information on this 72% and I expect for good reason. In many reports on accidents they use the term “speed was believed to be a factor”. Good enough for the drones. What does that mean? Exceeding the posted limit or driving at a dangerous speed? And if it was a factor how much of one? And what else was? Without the facts your hypothesis is no more valid than mine. And I am happy to be PROVED wrong.

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.

If the chances of survival are not all that good after hitting a substantial object at 100km/h then a head on collision with both vehicles travelling at 50kmh will do it. If you fall asleep at 100ks you won’t die. You will if you hit something and that is going to be another vehicle head on or a tree on the side of the road. In a modern car dropping a wheel off the side of a road should not automatically cause you to lose control and die in a flaming wreck. I would assume this would be at the low end of country road fatalities. Of course if you did this at 130 or 15kmh I think it becomes a whole lot more interesting.

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.

Yes, as I believe it should be.

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?

Who mentioned conspiracies? They don’t have to fabricate data. They produce the data in the form of statistics to suit their agenda. Their agenda appears to be raising revenue. You can produce statistics to support most points of view if you ask the right questions. Similarly they use of ambiguous and suggestive terms like “speed was believed to be a factor”

Get this from the SA Police website.

Relative to our population South Australia has one of the highest fatality rates compared with the rest of Australia and is a staggering 15% worse than the national average.

15% worse than the average is nothing to be proud of. But “one of the highest fatality rates” is ambiguous. There are 7 states/territories so are we in the top three or four. If we were second would not saying we are the second worst sound more impactful? If we are third then we are almost in the middle which doesn't have the same impact as "one of the highest".

Ambiguous use of data to make a point.

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.

“ 40% of all fatalities and 52% of serious injuries occur on metropolitan Adelaide roads.” Therefore 60% of fatalities are in the country. My bad.
http://dpti.sa.gov.au/__data/assets/..._2006-2010.pdf

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.

This is all very good but we still see an over representation of speed traps in 50k zones. This may lead the gullible into believing that 50k zones are the most dangerous places or that exceeding 50ks results in the most carnage.
It appears that 27% of “Serious casualty crashes” occur in these zones.

http://dpti.sa.gov.au/__data/assets/..._2006-2010.pdf

An interesting find in the same link “The most common type of serious crash in the metropolitan area was a vehicle colliding with a fixed object, accounting for approximately 141 serious crashes per year.” The two major types of objects struck in ‘hit fixed object’ type serious casualty crashes in metropolitan Adelaide, 2006-2010 were trees and the ubiquitous South Australian icon the stobie pole. A cement pole encased in H beam iron used to carry power lines. I for one have never understood how trees have a place on the side of metropolitan and in fact more so country roads. I also cannot fathom the rational of maintaining stobie poles within one or two feet of the side of major roads. If the government were serious about road safety would they not try to do something more about these than merely reduce the speed that motorists hit them?

[crisis]

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.

The “stationary rural speed cameras with four signs preceding them” ( I have never seen this) notwithstanding, the speed camera locations are a extremely cynical way of appearing to not be about revenue raising. Basically they say “slow down on such and such road (which may be 20 kilometres long) this morning” The best this can do is make people adhere to the speed limit for the entire length or road (which is not a bad thing) usually in peak hour (when they would be lucky to reach the speed limit) and would most likely only work on the already cautious who heard the broadcast. Seriously. In theory it sounds like a sincere attempt to stop motorist speeding and getting fined but in practice it is another cynical joke.
And any attempt to appear to address the question of “revenue raising” would be a reaction to the widely held suspicion anyhow. So along with “not speeding if I don’t want to get fined” perhaps a little public outcry will at least let them know we don’t all swallow their line.

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.

We all need to accept the fact that driving is the most dangerous activity most of us do on a day to day basis and stop treating it like cleaning our teeth. I would appreciate the government to target the real threats to road safety rather than the soft targets.

[crisis]

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

Here they made radar detectors illegal.

[henk4]

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.

I wouldn't call them cynical laws, but laws that are unfortunately required because the moron content of a large part of humanity exceeds acceptable levels. Innocent people like you and me are in this waynthe victims, but we could be much more serious victims if we let the morons do their thing unrestrained.

[MilesR]

Innocent people like you and me are in this waynthe victims, but we could be much more serious victims if we let the morons do their thing unrestrained.

Herein lies the reason behind it all. Contrary to Badsight's assertion, "whole seconds" is not really all that long to react to a situation. The normal braking response time is generally accepted as being about 2 seconds. If you are also distracted for two or three seconds before perceiving a risk, and the braking itself takes time and distance, there is the possibility of travelling 150 to 200 metres forward, or to drift across lanes or off the side of the road, at 100 or 110km/h. It does not make sense to claim that 100km/h is slow, when compared with 200km/h. Of course it is slower, but that is like arguing that being shot once is not dangerous, because it is safer than being shot four times. Both are dangerous. 100km/h is fast enough to be dangerous, while 200km/h on a public road should be cause for capital punishment.

The risk associated with something is made up of two components: the chance of an accident happening, and the consequences of it happening. The chance of an accident is increased at higher speeds. The chance may be more dependent upon other factors, such as skill etc., but it still increases with speed. The consequences of an accident are worse at higher speed, and if an accident happens, the consequences are entirely independent of driver skill. If you hit something immobile at 100km/h, the damage and injury will be the same, regardless of how improbable the crash was initially. The severity of the consequences cannot be dismissed as irrelevant to the risk.

If everyone could be depended upon to pay attention continuously, respond rapidly, and maintain proper vehicle control, then yes, 100km/h would be a safe speed, on an appropriate road. However, it is painfully obvious that drivers cannot be assumed to be this capable or conscientious. Drivers also cannot be depended upon to make an accurate and impartial assessment of their own abilities. For this reason, the laws must be imposed, and applied equally. For drivers to make up the rules that they think should apply to themselves would be a recipe for disaster. Even if your own assessment was accurate, would you be taking into account the self-assessment of the morons that you will encounter?

I agree with Badsight that accidents should be avoidable, but the fact remains that they are not. There will always be people who make mistakes, and in most cases, there will be no consequences, and the driver may never be aware of the flaws in their driving. Similarly, most people will not be able to correctly predict their response to an emergency. A friend of mine discovered that his advanced driver training course did not make him immune to the laws of physics, nor did it train his instincts to produce the correct response to an unforeseen eventuality. He was fortunate that the damage was minimal, and that no-one else was in his path. He had quite a high opinion of his ability, too.

thats rediculous

it turns them from a safety device to a revenue device

I dispute this. The only way that this logic can be sound is if you intend to exceed the speed limit everywhere. If you do not know where the cameras are, and you object to police revenue raising, then the solution is simple. Don't speed. Anywhere. This is how they are supposed to work.

Crisis, I do not believe that the government is exempt from providing sensible roads and regulations, but it is a more general problem with modern western democracy that we choose our rules only by voting for governments. This pretty much guarantees that we will get some rules that we do not like, and will only be able to change them by protesting, or at the next election, if one of the parties makes it an election issue. This is not ideal, but effectively we get what we vote for, unless we lived in america before 2009. As citizens, we are obliged to comply with these laws. The government is entitled to do as they please, and we are entitled to respond by voting them out. This regulates government decision-making, to a certain extent.

As for "fair" and reasonable limits, I do not find it a great imposition to drive 10km/h slower. Taking into account cornering, acceleration and braking phases, time spent stationary at intersections, and in heavy traffic, less time is spent travelling at the speed limit in cities, than many people might expect. A lower speed limit makes little real difference to travel times. It just makes the drive seem less exciting. I can live with that.

The signposted rural speed camera that I am thinking about is (or was) on the Hume highway in NSW, somewhere just north of the Victorian border, I think. It may have been removed or bypassed with the recent road expansion works.

We all need to accept the fact that driving is the most dangerous activity most of us do on a day to day basis and stop treating it like cleaning our teeth. I would appreciate the government to target the real threats to road safety rather than the soft targets.

I agree entirely with the first part of this, but the second part raises problems. What are the "real threats", and how should the government target them? If it is by removing the trees and power poles, so that people cannot crash into them, that is only catering to people who cannot keep their cars on the road. It would fail as a road-safety policy, as it would only make it safer to drive on foot paths, not roads (although it might reduce road traffic density), and I do not think that this is the goal of road safety. If it is stupidity, bad habits and inattention, it is difficult to think of a government policy, or police method, that could be applied to it. As far as I know, development of laser git-sensing technology is currently lagging behind that of gaydar.

Dropping a wheel off the road will not automatically have you losing control, but it is certainly enough for anyone who does not respond appropriately. A modern car only has its commendable grip and handling when it is on a good surface. If you have two wheels (or four) on a gravel shoulder, your grip and balance go out the window, and at 100km/h, I would be surprised if the majority of normal drivers did not lose control to at least some extent, before stopping or hitting something.

Also, hitting a stationary object at 100km/h is not the same as two cars colliding head-on at 50km/h, for two reasons. The first is kinetic energy. KE=(1/2)mv². Halving the speed reduces the kinetic energy to 1/4, while doubling the mass (two cars) only doubles the energy. Hence a 50km/h head-on crash will dissipate only 1/2 the energy of a single vehicle 100km/h crash.

The second reason is that both cars are deformable, whereas the tree/barrier/rock/other stationary object may not be. In this case, you will have twice as much energy being dissipated in a single car, rather than half as much energy spread over two cars.

Modern crash tests do not cover these scenarios. They crash a car at 54km/h or 65km/h into a stationary barrier that is deformable, like hitting a parked car. They do not test at 100km/h, nor on a rigid barrier, nor a deformable barrier at a speed opposing and matched to the approaching car. I doubt that even a modern 5-star car would save all of its occupants from serious injury or death in a 100km/h impact with a tree or concrete barrier, much less from an impact with a truck. I know that this is an old model car with a non-standard load, but it still gives a good idea of the forces involved in a 100km/h crash into a stationary, non-deformable object:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgjtSilW8yM"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgjtSilW8yM[/ame]

I believe that a stout tree or pole would be worse, because it is narrow, and can intrude further into the car. A VY Commodore hit a tree a few years ago, near my place, and was torn into three large pieces (front, back and engine), and several small pieces, killing both occupants. The tree had some slight damage to its bark. Tree>car. Speed may have been a factor.

[john14]

I hate the Creeper commercials but I can see their purpose.

[Matra et Alpine]

A fundamental problem with the application of lower speed limits is most drivers then think that that speed is "safe" and start paying less attention to the task.

Driving the German unrestricted autobahns it's clear that drivers pay MUCH more attention to the road and their decisions to change lanes than folks int he UK do with our limits of sometimes 50mph on motorways.

Drivers SHOULD be a little scared while driving so they pay more attention I favour a 6 inch spike in place of the steering wheel airbag !!!!!

[henk4]

Driving the German unrestricted autobahns it's clear that drivers pay MUCH more attention to the road and their decisions to change lanes than folks int he UK do with our limits of sometimes 50mph on motorways.

That's not my experience, people in Germany will change lanes whenever they want and very early too to make sure that you cannot overtake them before they passed that lorry...actually we are avoiding the German Autobahnen as much as possible these days.
The myth that German drivers are attentive should go through the sink.
furthermore they seem to be glued to the middle lane. (also not uncommon in the UK though)

[Ferrer]

That's not my experience, people in Germany will change lanes whenever they want and very early too to make sure that you cannot overtake them before they passed that lorry...actually we are avoiding the German Autobahnen as much as possible these days.
The myth that German drivers are attentive should go through the sink.
furthermore they seem to be glued to the middle lane. (also not uncommon in the UK though)

Or Spain for that matter...

It is true though that as you increase speed concentration and attention increase too.

[henk4]

Or Spain for that matter...

It is true though that as you increase speed concentration and attention increase too.

ha ha, so everybody should be driving 200 then....

[Ferrer]

Make that 300.

Supercars for everyone!

[henk4]

Make that 300.

Supercars for everyone!

but more seriously, the people who drive faster may be more attentive, but that is not the case for those who drive, let's say 80 or 90 (or lorrydrivers). So the impact of moronic behaviour which we discussed above will be far more serious than with lower speed differences. The safest way to drive is to consider everybody to be an idiot, (may be including yourself).

[Matra et Alpine]

if everyone NEW there might be someone diong 200 then I woudl suggest it woudl make them MUCH more attentive Then if we also start ignoring red lights they'll be even more careful

What car were you driving in Germany Pieter ? Coz not what I've experienced in the past with the big Mercs HP rented for us or when I'm out in the RX-8. MInd you it may differ ( as it does in the UK ) as to where. Kind of expected in the roads to/from/around the 'Ring. Also it might be relative to our expectations. In the UK it is the absolute WORST and many see it as a right to sit in the righ hand lane because they may wish to turn right in 5 miles !!!

[Matra et Alpine]

SO what we really want Pieter is a "super license" for drivers.
THe normal license you get to do 100km/h.
But drivers who can prove their skill and ability get to do 300 --- I'd sign up for that

As an interesting aside. A fellow competitior was driving on dual carriageway when an elderly driver pulled out in front of him. Approaching at 60mph he managed to avoid the inevitable side impact and reduced it to a "clip". The motor patrol police guys who came to the scene said to him that if it hadn't been for his attention and skill from racing there was going to be a serious accident. I also have used "the applciatino of skill and the use of excess speed for safety reasons" when I was photographed exceeding the UK speed limit !! So sometimes speed is the RIGHT thing.

WHich adds in "training" to the mix. We teach people how to drive , not how to avoid accidents and crashes. I remember when 19 taking the choice to go the other side of a car and accelerate to avoid a crash. ( I do look back now and realise some of that ws luck as no way was I that good at estimating the other persons speed )

[Ferrer]

but more seriously, the people who drive faster may be more attentive, but that is not the case for those who drive, let's say 80 or 90 (or lorrydrivers). So the impact of moronic behaviour which we discussed above will be far more serious than with lower speed differences. The safest way to drive is to consider everybody to be an idiot, (may be including yourself).

I agree with that. And you don't even need to exceed the speed limit to see very dangerous behaviours on the road. Unfortunately those can't be caught by speed cameras.

SO what we really want Pieter is a "super license" for drivers.
THe normal license you get to do 100km/h.
But drivers who can prove their skill and ability get to do 300 --- I'd sign up for that

They should also be able to prove common sense.

WHich adds in "training" to the mix. We teach people how to drive , not how to avoid accidents and crashes. I remember when 19 taking the choice to go the other side of a car and accelerate to avoid a crash. ( I do look back now and realise some of that ws luck as no way was I that good at estimating the other persons speed )

Which is probably what makes nordic drivers so good. They learn to control the car in difficult situation and environments. Here we just learn to operate cars and read signs... On the other hand we are really good at surviving in the urban jungle!!