In the thirty or so years I have been using the roads driving cars, trucks and motor cycles it is so often the ‘Moron Factor’ that leads to accidents. Unfortunately and too often it is not the moron who suffers.

We life in a society filled with distraction and our cars are no exception. Stereos, mobile phones, GPS devices, in-car entertainment, not to mention children, chatty friends and the fact we’re running late or have just been chewed out by the wife/boss.

Being in control of a tonne or more of metal, even a low speeds requires concentration, awareness, consideration and skill. Concentration and awareness are dependant upon one’s ability to remain focused on the job at hand, consideration of others well that should be peoples general treatment of each other on or of the road, and skill is or at least should be an integral part of a drivers training. Not just an ability to get a minimum number of questions correct and a vague ability to steer a vehicle.
What to do in any emergency situation, how does a car handle when it loses traction, when, where and how to accelerate through a corner. When do you accelerate through a situation and when do you slow down and allow other traffic to pass you.
Of course there are advanced driver training courses one can attend to further one’s skill unfortunately even after an incident very few motorists consider that this may be a good idea.
Indeed within the current learner driver structure, students are not shown even the most basic of these ‘advanced skills’ because it is assumed you should be driving in such away that you do not loose control of the vehicle. Total bunkum! Black ice, light rain, someone ahead with a leaky sump – any of which could find you losing control of the vehicle through no fault of your own.
Add to this the flagrant disregard so many motorists have to road laws other than the obvious ones under discusssion here.
Failure to indicate, driving in the right hand lane ( and how often do we see learner drivers with a family member at their side blithely tootling along in the right lane at 60k in an 80k zone. Or worse yet doing the same on the freeway), speeding through school zones or perhaps my pet hate, entering an intersection that you are unable to proceed through!
If the government really wanted to increase its revenue via fines for road abuse they’d set up speed cameras in every school zone and certainly one to catch the the hundreds of drivers every morning who choke the intersection of Auburn and Toorak roads.

Mandatory testing every three years – skill, road knowledge and psychological profile
Increase licence fees and registration so only people who really need to use cars would and use this money to build a viable functioning public transport system.

Driving is a privilege not a right and we need to treat it this way.

Oh one last thing.
To Mr Beissman, there is no full stop at the end of http://www.roadrules.vicroads.vic.gov.au/home.php. in the html link you have supplied. This causes the link to return a 404, page not found error.
The correct link is
http://www.roadrules.vicroads.vic.gov.au/home.php

In the thirty or so years I have been using the roads driving cars, trucks and motor cycles it is so often the ‘Moron Factor’ that leads to accidents. Unfortunately and too often it is not the moron who suffers.

We life in a society filled with distraction and our cars are no exception. Stereos, mobile phones, GPS devices, in-car entertainment, not to mention children, chatty friends and the fact we’re running late or have just been chewed out by the wife/boss.

Being in control of a tonne or more of metal, even a low speeds requires concentration, awareness, consideration and skill. Concentration and awareness are dependant upon one’s ability to remain focused on the job at hand, consideration of others well that should be peoples general treatment of each other on or of the road, and skill is or at least should be an integral part of a drivers training. Not just an ability to get a minimum number of questions correct and a vague ability to steer a vehicle.
What to do in any emergency situation, how does a car handle when it loses traction, when, where and how to accelerate through a corner. When do you accelerate through a situation and when do you slow down and allow other traffic to pass you.
Of course there are advanced driver training courses one can attend to further one’s skill unfortunately even after an incident very few motorists consider that this may be a good idea.
Indeed within the current learner driver structure, students are not shown even the most basic of these ‘advanced skills’ because it is assumed you should be driving in such away that you do not loose control of the vehicle. Total bunkum! Black ice, light rain, someone ahead with a leaky sump – any of which could find you losing control of the vehicle through no fault of your own.
Add to this the flagrant disregard so many motorists have to road laws other than the obvious ones under discusssion here.
Failure to indicate, driving in the right hand lane ( and how often do we see learner drivers with a family member at their side blithely tootling along in the right lane at 60k in an 80k zone. Or worse yet doing the same on the freeway), speeding through school zones or perhaps my pet hate, entering an intersection that you are unable to proceed through!
If the government really wanted to increase its revenue via fines for road abuse they’d set up speed cameras in every school zone and certainly one to catch the the hundreds of drivers every morning who choke the intersection of Auburn and Toorak roads.

Mandatory testing every three years – skill, road knowledge and psychological profile
Increase licence fees and registration so only people who really need to use cars would and use this money to build a viable functioning public transport system.

Driving is a privilege not a right and we need to treat it this way.

Let personal responsibility dictate our actions, not laws.

Toorak Road has visibility extending to 1k each way (in places). It has a single continuous white line the wole way.

Don’t try and feed me the “they’re right” mantra.

Also, targeting so-called ‘hoons’ who do burnouts or street drags in some remote areas away from housing or main roads will do stuff all to improve the road toll.

I’d would like to see every driver have to resit their road rules test every 5 years when their licence is renewed. And then a bunch of people each year are randomly selected to redo their drivers licence test. I see so many people on a daily basis who have no clue on most road rules.

Don’t just retest old folk or P platers, restest everyone. We all have a responsibility to know the road rules.

world’s stupid’s new road rule.only in vic ah.hope i don’t get pinged on my trip to see tiger…

anyone caught texting should lose their license immediately

Texting whithout looking does not mean you are 100% focused on the road. You lose some of your concentration in remembering which keys to press, how many times to press them, what your msg says, etc etc. Then lost in concentration could mean you lose complete sight of blind spots, and peripheral vision.

I just remember people getting fined for it before they had even received the notice of change from the RTA

I can see the Vics getting upset at a few of these, but all most of it really is doing is catching up with the rest of the country and the National road rules.

BTW the guy in the photo wouldn’t be breaking the law, ’cause he is parked.

Supercujo, Cupholder? NO! Now if you had a “commercially designed” adaptor that fitted nicely into that cupholder….. Could be a market for someone there.