{"id":2753,"date":"2013-06-21T18:08:54","date_gmt":"2013-06-21T08:08:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.privatefleet.com.au\/?p=2753"},"modified":"2020-06-20T01:37:00","modified_gmt":"2020-06-19T15:37:00","slug":"true-road-safety-where-is-the-line-drawn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/safety-2\/true-road-safety-where-is-the-line-drawn\/","title":{"rendered":"True Road Safety: Where Is The Line Drawn?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"130kmh\"<\/a>Naturally, as part of my role as a vehicle evaluator, I’m out and about a fair bit. There’s smart road rules, there’s smart drivers (well, a couple….) and there’s just way, way, way, WAY too many bad ones. Australian governments tell us all about road safety, with the focus on all road safety deemed to be speed-centric.<\/p>\n

I ask you: what’s truly more dangerous: travelling at 115 km\/h on a freeway that is zoned 100 or 110 under sunny blue skies OR driving at late afternoon, mid winter, with cloud cover and rain with no headlights on….with your car a silver or dark colour. What’s more dangerous; driving along a straight, rural road, with clear vision, doing 80 and the road is zoned 70 OR being in a small car, changing lanes suddenly so you’re in front of a B double whilst not indicating then jumping on the brakes?<\/p>\n

Today I was driving, in the company of a good mate, an example of Holden’s outgoing VE SS utes, the Z series with the dark grey five spoke alloys; the weather was cold but clear and traffic was moving well in all three freeway lanes. I’m in \"Speed<\/a>the right hand side lane, zoned at 110 km\/h and travelling at a tick above that…the middle and left hand lanes were reasonably full and, inexplicably, moving at under the limit. Behind me there’s a flash; thinking it’s a sun reflection off a windscreen, I ignored it. A few seconds later, another. I look and here’s an example of Australia’s Got (No Driving) Talent; bloke gesturing to me that I should move left so he can pass. Completely ignored was the fact that for he to pass me he’d be closer to 120 km\/h than I PLUS there was no room at the inn a.k.a the middle lane. Eventually he sidled past, on my left, at least 130 km\/h and disappeared. Twenty minutes later, with no variance in my speed by more than a couple of km\/h either way, we didn’t merely catch him, we passed him. Two more times, the same thing happened.<\/p>\n

On the way back home, earlier than this, we passed a few\u00a0 Highway Patrol cars, with all but one sitting roadside, with an officer holding a radar. There was also a marked police car ahead of one with a Community Police signage….both of these changed lanes without indicating quite a few times. So while you, I and everyone else is being beaten senseless with the message “Don’t Speed”, there’s other avenues of safety being forgotten, or, possibly, exploited. Let’s not kid ourselves; safety in most states really is driven by revenue and is coated in a sickly sweet road safety sugar to make it easier for the populace to swallow. In real terms, the road toll is fairly static compared to the amount of extra drivers joining the road each year. Let’s also not overlook how many cars there are, on our roads country wide, that are equipped with ABS, airbags and so on. So our roads are becoming more cluttered, the cars we drive are far more safe yet two things stay the \"Mark<\/a>same: we’re being told that speed kills and no one mentions these two words….”driver training”.<\/p>\n

If speed kills, there’s an awful amount of ghosts driving cars. If speed kills, then Craig Lowndes, Mark Winterbottom, Mark Webber, etc, must be bloody lucky. What’s that you say, they’re trained drivers? Thank you sir, my point exactly. And then there’s this: http:\/\/news.drive.com.au\/drive\/motor-news\/1000km-at-130kmh–and-still-alive-20130620-2ok2x.html<\/a><\/p>\n

In Australia’s capital cities there’s plenty of driver training companies; In Sydney, for example, there’s Ian Luff’s Drive To Survive. Brissie has SDT Safe Driver Training. Victoria picks up the Australian Driver Trainers Association whilst companies such as adrenalin.com.au run advanced driver training courses at racetracks, including Perth’s Barbagallo. Says a lot, doesn’t it, that companies such as these have to work over the entrenched attitude the government says we should have whilst forgetting the simple, the basic fact that better drivers drive better…..<\/p>\n

  http:\/\/credit-n.ru\/kredity-online-blog-single.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Naturally, as part of my role as a vehicle evaluator, I’m out and about a fair bit. There’s smart road rules, there’s smart drivers (well, a couple….) and there’s just way, way, way, WAY too many bad ones. Australian governments tell us all about road safety, with the focus on all road safety deemed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-safety-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2753"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12164,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2753\/revisions\/12164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.privatefleet.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}