Australia records highest road toll in over a decade

[Franco Cozzo]

Originally Posted by prydey

I don't spend a lot of time on the road admittedly but from my experience poor driving isn't unique to new drivers. I wouldn't even say it's the majority. Again, from my experience, the worst driving I see is from those on open licences, and often older drivers.


Here's a question.

How many people would drive differently if they had a police officer in the passenger seat, or if there was a police presence nearby?

If you answer that you would drive differently, ask yourself why? Are you someone that can't work unless supervised? You need someone watching to make sure you obey the rules.

Driver behaviour won't change while there is a general lack of respect for authority. And that won't change any time soon.


So while driver education and rule enforcement is important, it's general attitudes that are the problem. Society today is selfish.

Its not so much I have an issue with authority, I want to know the reasons behind why they're the rules.

Like why do I have to do 40 in a road works zone when there's no road works, because its on an adjacent road?

There's no reason for the main road to be down to 40, so if there's no police there and no workers, I'm not going to do 40 because I don't see a reason for it.

'Because those are the rules' just isn't good enough, and don't expect me to follow them if thats how you behave.

No different to work, have a customer who makes you sign onto their sites, online, then another sign on on another platform, and then sign on their book.

So I do one and not the other two, why do you need me to sign in three times on your site? Give me the reasons why.

Never read our SWMS and I'm the guy at the company who is responsible for enforcing them, to the point where I've sent them to 30x different customers and only one of them has actually read it and asked me why something irrelevant to the project was in there - it just shows you how its just there to tick the box.

I'm not going to read 11 pages of bullshit, for the sake of reading 11 pages of bullshit - just sign here on the bottom and put the date on it.

We're also not supposed to wear short sleeves and shirts, but I'm not going to enforce it in hot weather on the guys unless customer representative shows up on site. Just keep them in the car, if someone shows up put em on, when they leave take them off.

There's rules and then there's rules - its more about how you play the game than actually doing the right thing.

If you've got a legitimate reason for why something is then I'm happy to hear it and follow the rule book, if its 'just because' then **** you and your rules I'll do what I think is right.

If its not hurting anyone then who cares if we're a bit flexible for the sake of things working well.

I don't think there's a legitimate case for fines circa 10km/h over the speed limit having an impact on road safety - which in Victoria are the vast majority of camera fines.

[b0son]

Originally Posted by Franco Cozzo

I don't think there's a legitimate case for fines circa 10km/h over the speed limit having an impact on road safety

They'll of course argue that there is. One of the pre-eminent Aus roads safety researchers found crash risk doubles every 10kph over the speed limit. The only problem is that he cherry-picked his data and analysed it in such a way as to show that relationship, but when re-analysed with a more complete dataset, another statistician found that relationship didn't hold true. What a surprise.

But even if it did hold true, so what? Double the crash risk is still 2x of stuff-all. The risk of you dying in a crash, doing average km each year, is once in several lifetimes worth of driving. It's frankly nonsense to be being policed over it.