Stop the Madness on Our Roads

November 11, 2015
by Rodney Olsen
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stop

Are you the kind of person who likes to eat a nice, big dinner while watching your favourite television program? It’s OK if you do. I really don’t have a problem with that.

What I have a problem with is if you choose to be chowing down big time and watching episodes of Futurama on your iPad ….. while driving at 90 kilometres per hour down the highway. That’s maximum craziness right there. And in case you think that’s just a strange idea I’ve concocted, let me assure you that I saw this happening while motoring along Reid Highway last night.

A guy in an old gold Mitsubishi was careering along the somewhat busy road, stuffing his face, with a dash mounting bracket securely directing his full sized iPad toward the driver’s seat. I can’t be 100% sure it was Futurama but it was certainly some kind of animated program that had his attention. When I noticed what was going on I chose not to stay in his general vicinity, preferring to get as far away from this impending car crash as soon as possible.

I wrote last year about seeing a young woman being Driven to Distraction as she applied a face full of make up while hurtling down the freeway. I just wonder what goes through some people’s heads. Obviously not a lot in many cases.

It’s time to stop the madness on our roads.

Over the last week there’s been a discussion in the media over whether senior drivers should have to display ‘S’ plates to alert other drivers to the fact that an older driver is on the road. The topic was raised by an insurance company which thinks it’d make our roads safer. I was thinking about it all and came to a very simple conclusion. Either people are fit to drive or they’re not. While some seniors might well need to hand in their licenses there are some young and middle aged people that should be slamming their licenses on the desk down at the local licensing centre saying, “I’m sorry, but I really don’t deserve this. You can keep it.”

No one ‘deserves’ a drivers license unless they are fully capable of doing everything necessary to safely operate a vehicle. If a 99 year old can pass the standard test they should be able to drive without being labelled with an ‘S’ plate. If a guy in his forties thinks that a meal and a show can be enjoyed at the same time as driving in traffic at speed, he doesn’t need special plates, he needs to lose his license.

One of the recommendations coming out of the media discussion this week was that anyone over the age of 49 should be re-tested for their license. I’m 52. I’ve been driving for over 35 years without a road accident. It would be inconvenient having to find time to get tested. But I’d be happy to endure the inconvenience if it meant that fewer people on our roads considered driving an automatic entitlement.

What are some stupid things you’ve seen while driving? What do you think of added testing for drivers? Should seniors be forced to display ‘S’ plates?



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Driven to Distraction

March 12, 2014
by Rodney Olsen
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mirror

While many think it was something said by James Dean, “Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse.” is actually a line from the 1949 Humphrey Bogart film, Knock On Any Door. And for a bonus point, the actor who said it was John Derek.

I spotted a young lady trying to live out that ‘wisdom’ yesterday morning on the freeway.

It was bumper to bumper and traffic was crawling along, so the woman in the Ford Focus in front of me thought that it was a good time to multi-task. At first her head started bobbing up and down every few seconds, the way that heads do when someone is texting from the driver’s seat.

Next came the hair and make up routine.

Her left hand wrenched the rear-view mirror down. Why worry about what other traffic may be on the road when there’s lipstick to apply. For the next few kilometres it was all about applying a face full of make up and doing a lot of work on her hair. Most of the time this meant that she was travelling on a stop start freeway without her hands on the wheel. I imagine she wanted to look good in the body bag.

You have one job.

Here’s the thing. If you’re driving …. you’re driving. That’s it. I know that we talk about multi-tasking and I know that women are better at it than men, I get that, but when you are behind the wheel you need to be totally absorbed in the driving process and that’s all.

Driving is a matter of life or death.

I don’t care how well you think you drive and how well you think you can multi-task, distracted drivers kill. I don’t care if it’s a boring drive and you think you can manage a few things at once, just do one thing, drive. If you’re so busy that you ‘need’ to do other things while behind the wheel, re-evaluate your schedule. Cancel or postpone something. Learn to say no to people who require that you multi-task while driving. Your life may well depend on it.

Someone else’s life might depend on it too.

Are you prepared to be the one to break the news to the family of the driver of the other car that someone they love isn’t coming home? Do you think they’re going to accept your excuse that their mother, father, child is dead because you had to reply to a text message about where you’re meeting for coffee? Do you think it’ll ease their pain knowing that at the time of impact you were looking fabulous because you’d just finished doing your make up?

I know that this post might seem a little over the top and melodramatic, but I suspect it doesn’t even begin to go far enough for the many, many people who have lost someone to driver distraction.

Please hear one thing. When you’re on the road …. just concentrate on that one thing …. driving.

What’s the dumbest thing you’ve seen someone do behind the wheel?



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If you only watch one YouTube video this year …..

June 9, 2012
by Rodney Olsen
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…. make sure it’s this video.

This has been around for a while but I only watched it yesterday …. and cried.

I know that you don’t have much time and I know that you don’t normally watch YouTube videos that run more than a couple of minutes but please, please, please take ten minutes to watch this video. Once you’ve watched it, share it and make sure those you love, especially young people, watch this video. It may save you an enormous amount of grief.

I see drivers texting all the time and it scares, annoys and frustrates me. I can only hope that messages like this one can turn things around for those who still don’t get it.



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Stop!

June 12, 2009
by Rodney Olsen
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traffic_light.jpgIf you’re out driving today I’ve got a small piece of advice which may help you avoid some heartache. If you see a red light, stop. In fact, if you see an orange light and it’s at all possible, stop.

I know that that’s the law but a lot of people seem to have forgotten about what they should do at traffic lights.

I don’t know what it is but over the past year or so I’ve seen an increasing trend among some motorists to speed up and head through lights that have been orange for quite some time or even lights that have already turned red.

On my way home last night I saw a lady sitting in her little white car at a light which had recently turned red. A young guy driving a ute with a huge roo bar came hurtling towards her before slamming on his brakes at the last minute. It was wet, he was going too fast, it all ended very badly.

Both vehicles were still drivable but there was a fair bit of damage, especially the little white car that got hit.

I handed both drivers a business card in case they need a witness and cycled away.

You might save a couple of minutes by running an orange or red light but you also run the very real risk of losing more that a little time.



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Cadel Reignites Car versus Bike Debate

December 12, 2008
by Rodney Olsen
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If you want to get emotions running hot there’s nothing that works quite as well as talking about cyclists on our roads.

Cycling star, Cadel Evans, has stirred things up by claiming that Australian drivers are far too agressive, especially towards cyclists. He has been quoted by News.com.au in an article titled, Australians drive cyclist star Cadel Evans to despair.

I drive on the road and I don’t like people just not having respect for other road users.

I spend half my year in Europe so I know what the traffic is like there.

It is really strange, to be honest, the way Australian drivers are.

Our roads have much less traffic, are far larger, and the drivers have much more space, but they are much more aggressive and negative to other road users.

When you ride a race in Italy or Switzerland or France, the roads are much narrower and there is much more traffic, but the drivers are much more tolerant and easier to deal with. It is a bit of a shame.

His comments have started a flood of comments on the article with both drivers and cyclists throwing insults.

I see the main problem being the lack of education for road users. Many drivers are unaware that it is perfectly legal for cyclists to ride two abreast. Unfortunately some cyclists will ride two abreast even when it isn’t safe to do so.

I’m currently cycling about 250 km a week and I’d admit that the majority of drivers are courteous but it would only take one errant driver to put me in hospital or a morgue so it concerns me that there are many drivers still don’t get it.

The argument from a lot of drivers is that cyclists break the road rules all the time. Let me tell you something, it not only annoys you, it annoys me. For some reason we all get tarred with the same brush so when some cyclists do the wrong thing, there are motorists who take that as a license to harrass the rest of us.

Common sense tells us that not all cyclists break the rules. Common sense also tells us that even though I’m seeing more and more motorists running red lights and making other dangerous and careless errors on the road, I don’t have the right to make blanket statements about ‘all drivers’.

Some drivers are dangerous. Some cyclists are dangerous.

Some drivers complain that cyclists slow them down. I wonder what those drivers would do with the extra 10 or 20 seconds they would gain if they didn’t have to slow down to pass a cyclist. (And lets face it, you probably don’t even lose that much time. You probably just get to the next red light a little later.) On the other hand, if the thousands of commuter cyclists in each city decided to jump into a car instead each day, could you imagine the extra traffic chaos? Could you imagine how much longer the daily drive to work would take?

Thankfully, most of my new commute is on a well built and well maintained cycle path. I have great joy in whizzing past rows and rows of cars which are stuck in peak hour traffic.



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