when passion drives you

Heads up folks, here comes a fat rant. Deep breath in, and…

Driving in Melbourne over the past few years really has become tedious. The growth and population of the city is too big for the archaic road system to keep up meaning there’s pretty much always traffic on the main arterials. But that’s not really what’s bothering me. What I’m completely fed up with is how terrible most of our citizens have become at driving.

Our strict enforcement of speeding (+3km/h) has slowly bred a city of people happy to drive around like zombies, 10km/h under the limit. Anybody who tries to drive at or (heaven forbid) slightly above the limit is labelled a ‘hoon’. To combat these ‘hoons’ the police can impound or even confiscate their cars.

These pathetic laws are a knee-jerk reaction of a baffled government who can’t figure out why the road toll won’t go down.

There are two main culprits here; poor driver training and poor mindset. The wrong attitude to driving or not knowing how to drive is a recipe for disaster. A lot of this poor mindset with younger people comes down to parents not taking enough interest in driver training for their kids. Too often kids are just sent off to a driving school to learn how to drive. Most of these driving schools have instructors who are very good and teaching people how to pass their driving test and not how to drive ‘properly’.

Our media helps no end in fuelling this mentality too. There are countless examples of ‘experts’ in the media claiming that advanced driver training leads to overconfidence on the roads. Mark Skaife and Ian Luff, two former competitive racing drivers, have both copped flak for their justified criticism of our outdated licensing system. How is teaching people how a car behaves when stuff happens a bad thing? Can you imagine if we had the same ideas on teaching children about water safety and swimming? Better hope little Billy never finds himself in the water as we didn’t teach him how to swim just in case he’d get overconfident around the water!

When I went for my licence I was well prepared due to my parent’s active role in teaching me. There are countless good habits my dad taught me which my driving school instructor never did. Things such as not changing lanes in front of a truck when approaching a red light as this greatly reduces its stopping distance – if you don’t understand that a 40-tonne truck needs that room to slow down safely and you cutting in reduces his required stopping distance then you shouldn’t be driving. So did I learn anything from my driving instructor? Yes, I learnt to turn my whole head when checking my mirrors so the tester knows I’m doing it as I was wearing sunglasses during my driving test! Ridiculous isn’t it?

All I did on my test was tool around in 60 zones for about 10 minutes and then do a ‘straight line reverse’, which required me to reverse 30 meters without hitting the kerb. I think this manoeuvre is quite useless and actually a bit dangerous. Why would they encourage me to reverse down the street? Wouldn’t a U-turn be better? Either way, did I have to demonstrate my ability to react in an emergency situation? No. How about merging onto a freeway in heavy traffic? No. How about driving at night in the rain in the country? No. How could any logical person believe that our system is good? Why we don’t use a similar system to getting a motorcycle licence I don’t know. It would at least be a good place to start.

VicRoads did actually tweak one of their laws late last year. What was it I hear you ask? Something clever and productive? Nup. They added the BMW M3 to their banned cars list for Victorian P–plate drivers – someone over there finally figured out that it’s a fast car. Genius! A Lotus Elise however, provided it’s not the supercharged version, still ok!?

A 300kW HSV is no more dangerous than an 80kW econo-box before a human takes control. A car is entirely harmless on its own!

We avoid teaching our kids how to drive properly, instead relying on endlessly (and it would seem somewhat pointlessly) spruiking the same naive rhetoric that keeping kids out of ‘hoon’ cars and insisting they don’t speed will somehow prevent accidents. A driver with the wrong mindset will drive irresponsibly regardless of a car’s power figure.

There are countless little things that people do on our roads every minute of every day but because people generally aren’t taught the nuances of safe driving they go unnoticed. How often do you see somebody unable to keep in their lane? How many times do you see people change lanes with no comprehension of the closing speed of other cars or without using their indicators? Our focus is far too narrow when tackling the issue of road safety.

I bought my first WRX when I was still on my P-plates and I was allowed as there were no restrictions back then. So there I was, a young male in a quick sports car yet I didn’t wrap myself around a pole at 2am. Why? Mindset. I respected the performance of my car and appreciated that you can’t drive around utilising said performance all the time, that’s what race tracks are for. I was also taught things that I’m sure a vast majority of drivers we share our roads with have never even thought about; how to correct understeer and lift-off oversteer and how to brake properly in cars with ABS and in those without it.

I’m really not trying to be a hero about driving here, all I’m saying is that we should find it alarming that we give out licences to people who don’t understand the basic physics of how a car works. Do me a favour and ask your spouse/friends/co-workers if they know what tyre pressure their tyres should have, which wheels are the driven ones and if it has ESP/ABS and what that all adds up to if they find them selves in an emergency situation. I bet most won’t even think it’s information they should know.

We share our roads with far too many people who see driving as boring, brain-off time in between whatever else they are doing in their busy lives. Recently in Victoria we had three separate car crashes over a weekend and the media were reporting that “speed was a factor in two of the three incidents”. What about the third one? They don’t report it as “driver error” or “the car had cheap, shit tyres”. Don’t get me wrong here I’m not condoning speeding, I’m just pointing out that we only ever blame speed for a crash. When speed isn’t the cause we shrug our shoulders and move on. When a car load of teenagers crash we say, “bloody hoon dickheads”, but when a family has a crash on the Hume Highway (as seems to happen every long weekend) we say, “how sad but it happens”. We don’t have to lose a single life on our roads but the government needs to stop avoiding the issue and tackle it once and for all.

Let’s start by impounding low performance drivers not high performance cars.

Benji

Click here for a map that shows where and how road deaths occurred in Victorian between 2008 and 2011.

Click here for a grasp of poor mindset.