A rant about the current "road safety" insanity

Is anyone else sick to the back teeth of the current idiocy perpetuated by the media, government and assorted national police forces about road safety?

 

You can't go 24 hours without hearing a story on the media about how some teenage idiot with far too much engine and way too little ability, judgement and skills has wrapped their XR6 or Skyline around a pole and  killed everyone onboard.  You then get quotes in the media story such as this complete shite:

 

Victorian police are wondering when young drivers are going to 'get the bloody message' after an unlicensed teenager, believed to have been speeding, smashed into a pole.

 

Are the police truly that stupid that they even have to ask the question?  The answer is, very simply, never.  The average teenager/twentysomething clearly believes that are indestructible, has absolutely no ability to make a sound judgement about the future repercussions of their actions, and actively enjoys taking risks.  Throw in the thrill of breaking the rules, doing something "extreme" and peer pressure, and the chances of stopping them from doing stupid things in cars simply for the asking is precisely zero.

 

Then you get the most incredibly naive and idiotic crap like this in the media and my blood just boils.  Great idea, let them get away with it because it might be dangerous to stop them.  Anyone think that that approach is a long term solution?  It's like the stupidity of proposing that police abandon high speed pursuits due to danger - the sole objective of anyone busted for speeding would be to hit whatever speed forced the police to abandone the pursuit.  Luckily our nanny state doesn't quite seem to be going there just yet, but look at some of the clueless bullshit in that article...

 

Meanwhile, a woman whose 21-year-old daughter was killed in 2005 by a teenage driver during a police chase, said police had a "fixation" on pursuing stolen vehicles. "To my mind, pursuing stolen vehicles is very dangerous and pretty fruitless," Frances Rose told Fairfax Radio Network on Monday.

Gee, Frances - to my mind you're a fucking moron.  Do you not understand the fairly simple principle that by doing as you suggest, police would be sending the message that anyone stealing and driving away a vehicle would be allowed to get away with it?

In my experience, there are a number of ways to deal with behaviour you require to stop or change.

(1)  Ask nicely, point out the required behaviour, and educate the people concerned about the dangers and downsides to the behaviour.

Waste of time.  People generally exhibit the undesired behaviour because they don't care about the rules, can't be bothered complying, find them inconvenient, find it actively fun to break them etc.  You are wasting your breath even asking.

(2)  Tell people bluntly to stop doing it, and penalise them if they do.

Also often a waste of time.  Penalties don't stop people doing stupid things unless the outcome is so horrifically unthinkable that even your average brain dead twentysomething gets it, and there's no way our wrist-slapping nanny state legal system would allow something really effective.  You know, like having your car crushed, loss of licence for 10 years, $25,000 mandatory fine and 2 years gaol time.  For a first offence.  Until the penalties approach this sort of level they're just not going to be effective as they won't sink through the layer of stupidity that insulates the consciousness of the people involved.

Even then, you'll still get people who won't follow the rules, because the I-won't-be-caught-I'm-indestructable crap still kicks in, and you still have to remember we are dealing with a bunch of people for whom long term planning isn't a strong point.  And you only need one short instance of pedal-to-the-metal before you're surgically removing someone from a tree.

(3)  Prevent the problem from happening in the first place.

Now we're talking.  How about as a minimum:

• raise the minimum licence age to 20
• all trainee drivers required to complete a minimum of 100 hours of driver training with a qualified driving instructor, with log books
• a real driving exam - two hours in mixed and heavy traffic, parking and maneuvering etc, plus demonstrating of defensive driving techniques
• for the first five years of your licence, you are restricted to a 4 cylinder car with a maximum of 100 horsepower, maximum of one passenger in the car, zero BAC, no mobile phone usage whatsoever (handsfree be buggered).
• if you're caught breaching any of the above, or break a single traffic rule, you lose your licence for two years with no option for appeal.  If you're also doing anything vaguely hoonish (speed by more than 20km/h over the limit, drive dangerously, race etc) your care is crushed - with no option for appeal.
• at the end of that five years, you are required to resit the same driving test.

Combine this with the lovely new police system that can photo-ID numberplates and flag the car for attention by the nice plod lying in wait up the road, and I reckon you'd put the fear of dog into the little bastards.  There's nothing like some healthy fear of consequences to improve compliance.

It'll never happen, but until it does, my attitude to seeing three people being hosed out of a WRX that's now an integral part of a bridge stanchion is couldn't care less.  If you act like a fuckwit then at least your genes are out of the pool, and if you're stupid enough to hang around with fuckwits then it's pretty much the same.