driving debate

[Franko]

DRIVING TEST EXAM – LEARNER LEVEL FOR GAA BOARDERS
Q1.  You are driving along a motorway and you come up to a car driving at 50Mph. Do you (a) take up the "Hamster Position"  where you sit up real close to the steering wheel with your knuckles white on the wheel and curse the day that person ever got a licence for the next 100 miles or (b) do you use the width of the motorway and overtake and go on about your business?

Q2. You have this fixation that falls short of shooting pensioners to keep them off the road but you would like to see them do a speed test because if they are travelling at 50mph they are a danger to HGV's.  The law in Ireland on motorways is that all HGV's must travel at 80Kmh or 50mph maximum on motorways.  Which is the biggest danger (a)  the person carefully driving along at around 50mph which is the speed the HGV should be doing in the first place, or (b) the trucks that travel at 100+kmh, almost double their speed limit and outside their braking capability?

Q3. You have just bought your first or second car and along with all the flash wheels it has a CD player. You are in a hurry to nowhere that is a life and death matter and you want to listen to your music and you need to put in a new CD. You do this on a slip road while you are travelling at 75mph (120kmh), the maximum speed for a motorway. There is an accident ahead of you and the ambulance is loading a person onto a stretcher (or there is a slower driver) and you brake hard and avoid a serious crash. Are you (a) Stupid but lucky, or (b) Think you are a hero for avoiding a collision?

Q4.  You are coming out of Newry heading Southbound on the M1 and you are driving  a car with English registration plates.  About 30 miles on you see a sign that says 120kmh and you say to yourself (a) Oh, they have metric signs down here, that means 75mph where I come from so I must obey and drive carefully, or, (b) to hell with them and their metric signs, I will floor it up to 120mph and if am stopped I pretend I didn't know, and I don't really care anyway because I won't pay the fine?

My point about HGV's referred to the UK (and the north of Ireland  ), where their limit is not 50mph but 56mph. (*edit) I'm not sure about Ireland or the rest of Europe.

Unless they are behaving seriously illegally, no HGV should be travelling at any more than 56mph (90kph) as all trucks have mandatory speed limiters fitted which does not physically allow them to travel any faster.  This is what the rule makers have decided is inside their 'braking capability'.

The people who make rules of the road always tend to err on the side of safety.  They have decided that it is safe for a vehicle weighing 44 tonnes to travel at these speeds on motorways.  If this vehicle has to overtake a car because the driver of the car deems that they are not capable of controlling the vehicle at any faster than 50mph then I firmly believe that it the car driver who is the problem.

[give her dixie]

Currently there is a new law in place whereby truck and coach drivers have to do 35 hours of professional
training every 5 years to obtain a Certificate of Professional Competence (CPC).

I have done part of it already and can honestly say that I have learned a lot of new things that help on a
daily basis. Something similar on a lower scale should come into play for car driving, for safety if nothing else.

PS as Canalman said above, the M50 has to be the worst road in Europe I have been on for dangerous / careless driving......

[armaghniac]

There is an obvious case for a camera at motorist exits to record maggotry and ticket same. It should be possible to program cameras only to record lane changers etc.

[qubdub]

qub, is there a mandated minimum speed limit on the motorway?  Sounds to me, by your own admission, that it was your fault, distracted as you were by changing cd's.  What if there had been a dead animal in the road?  Aren't you expected to maintain an assured clear distance?  No, I think Judge Judy brings down the gavel on this one.  Life (in Craigavon) without chance of parole.

I defy anyone to drive the length from Enniskillen to Belfast without changing radio, opening sunroof, adjusting a mirror and/or driving position, taking a drink of water or some other minor distraction. As far as I know they aren't offences and it isn't an offence to change a CD while driving either - as opposed to using a mobile phone. That said I would probably have been in the wrong. My query is, what if you had a legitimate reason for being distracted, and ploughed into the back of someone travelling at 50mph, as per my original scenario?

[armaghniac]

There are good sightlines on motorways. If you are so close to the vehicle in front that a 20mph speed difference is important then you should not then change your CD.

[qubdub]

There are good sightlines on motorways. If you are so close to the vehicle in front that a 20mph speed difference is important then you should not then change your CD.

Sightlines are more than adequate but sometimes it is difficult to judge when driving at night. In any case, my anecdote was simply to illustrate how driving at dangerously low speeds on a motorway can easily cause an accident.

[tyssam5]

qub, is there a mandated minimum speed limit on the motorway?  Sounds to me, by your own admission, that it was your fault, distracted as you were by changing cd's.  What if there had been a dead animal in the road?  Aren't you expected to maintain an assured clear distance?  No, I think Judge Judy brings down the gavel on this one.  Life (in Craigavon) without chance of parole.

I defy anyone to drive the length from Enniskillen to Belfast without changing radio, opening sunroof, adjusting a mirror and/or driving position, taking a drink of water or some other minor distraction. As far as I know they aren't offences and it isn't an offence to change a CD while driving either - as opposed to using a mobile phone. That said I would probably have been in the wrong. My query is, what if you had a legitimate reason for being distracted, and ploughed into the back of someone travelling at 50mph, as per my original scenario?

CD's? People still have those? But yeah picking an album out of 1000 on your phone is nearly as bad as texting.

[tyssam5]

Spot on there Bud.  The excessive speeds are rarely worth it anyway. Next time someone flies by you on any main road or motorway, wait until you come to the next town or traffic light and yer man will probably be just 5 or 6 cars ahead of you.  Then you get through the same traffic light about 10 secs after he does.  That's all he has gained.

Alternatively if you are the speedster, then have you gained only 10 seconds at the expense of your blood pressure?

On country roads you are right and that's were most deaths in Ireland happen not motorways. Yet the only places I every see people getting pulled for speed is on the edge of 30 miles limits in towns or on motorways - not the lad doing 70mph on a 14 foot wide road.

[DickyRock]

qub, is there a mandated minimum speed limit on the motorway?  Sounds to me, by your own admission, that it was your fault, distracted as you were by changing cd's.  What if there had been a dead animal in the road?  Aren't you expected to maintain an assured clear distance?  No, I think Judge Judy brings down the gavel on this one.  Life (in Craigavon) without chance of parole.

I defy anyone to drive the length from Enniskillen to Belfast without changing radio, opening sunroof, adjusting a mirror and/or driving position, taking a drink of water or some other minor distraction. As far as I know they aren't offences and it isn't an offence to change a CD while driving either - as opposed to using a mobile phone. That said I would probably have been in the wrong. My query is, what if you had a legitimate reason for being distracted, and ploughed into the back of someone travelling at 50mph, as per my original scenario?

Yep, all those can be prosecuted under "Driving with undue care and attention" though very unlikely unless you cause/nearly cause an accident.

I agree that we all should be retested every ten years - and it should not only be for those over a certain age. If anything to ensure that people are up to date with the rules of the road.

[andoireabu]

I do a lot of driving for work and would consider myself an above average driver.  I'd fall into the young driver category at 24 and have a full clean driving licence for 7 years now.  I don't see why I should have to resit a test in three years time because I would fail it and there goes the job.  I wouldn't fail it because I don't know what I'm doing or I make mistakes but because I don't have both hands on the wheel all the time, I don't check my mirrors every three seconds, the odd time the indicators don't get used and yes I might slide in a little close behind someone when changing lanes and I've nearly run out of space.  That doesn't make me an unfit driver but it would fail the test (I failed my first driving test for changing lanes thing). 

With regards to speed I can say that I don't do it anymore because there is no point and it's not worth the risk.  Think I'm right in saying that travelling at 5mph extra for a full hour will save you 5 minutes,  but you have to run the risk of getting caught speeding for and hour.  (Some of the maths geeks might disagree)  What's the point in that?  If you cant find five minutes to leave earlier or you can't afford to be five minutes late then you must be in a serious job.

On the motorways I think a minimum speed limit would be a good idea and it could be set the same as the slowest vehicles (HGV's) as this would take away a level of speed difference (50mph people, HGV's, 70mph people and speeders) and isn't that much of a difference between 50 and 56.

One thing I have notice as a proble is roundabouts.  There seems to be no standard for how people use them.  When I was taught it was the left lane for anything between 6 and 12 on the clock and the right lane for between 12 and 6.  Though now there can be three or four lanes annd they usually have writing on them as to where they can take you.  People don't seem to get this though and just sit in the right lane until they get to  the exit they want and then wing across maybe two lanes of traffic!!

People going into junctions that they can't clear also bugs the hell out of me but I think I've said enough for now!!

[lawnseed]

This has been doing my head in for ages. Older drivers hovering down the motorway at 50 or flying down country lanes at 60. I believe older drivers are as dangerous as young new drivers.

In the pub the other night my mate suggested that everyone be retested every ten years. Do you think this would fair? Could it work? Would the roads be safer?

no 26 county driver would pass the test in nordie land. they simply don't know how to use roundabouts. because there is an unwritten rule and they ignore rules that don't directly penalise them when broken.

[thewobbler]

I did the Driver's Awareness course a few months ago rather than taking 3 points.

Being the kind of person who doesn't like being pontificated to I was, let's just say, cynical before we started.

But it was actually a really good refresher course.

I do about 20k miles a year and I know I'm a good driver (doesn't everyone?) because I concentrate on the road around me. Most of those miles are on the A1/MI from Newry to Belfast, and I know where people turn to idiots and drive accordingly.

- The main M1 entry point at Sprucefield, where a culture has developed of entering the M1 at 5mph, instead of using the slip road to build up speed.
- The Castlewellan Road exit at Banbridge, where everyone enters the A1 in the fast lane.
- The stretch for 2 miles after Dromore going north, where everyone forgets about the change of speed limit drives at 58mph in a 70, in the fast lane.
- The turn for Dromara (at the filling station) where anyone turning right feels the need to drive at 45mph in the fast lane for 2 miles prior.
- The main Sprucefield roundabout, where cars exiting from McDonalds pay no attention to oncoming traffic.
- The new Sprucefield roundabout, where I have on 4 separate occasions been forced into a complete stop on the through road, where people have missed the turn and would prefer to kill people than drive forward to the next right turn (which is 100m away).
- On almost every stretch of the A1 which has an uphill part, you can guarantee that a lorry driving at 60 mph will try to overtake a lorry driving at 59mph.

Anyway, what this course proved to me (albeit from a small sample) is that the average driver doesn't think about their driving. Of the 16 of us on the course, only 2 of us knew the speed limits for each type of road, and more than half didn't understand the "national speed limits apply" sign.

3-4 people were convinced that 55mph was the national speed limit, which means they spend more time watching Cannonball Run than watching our roads.

The nicest thing about the course was a simple piece of advice, which you should pass on. If you let someone out at a junction, it is human nature that they will in turn let someone else out of a junction; one good deed and all that. Traffic moves more freely, tempers don't get frayed, but most importantly, by osmosis they're being tuned to think about the road ahead, and not just about themselves. Everyone can help.

[trueblue1234]

There's a lot of presuming going on in this thread, like do all of these Motorway 50 mph drivers fit into the "older driver" category?  Have you checked each one as you pass them?  Are you sure some of them are not young lads changing CDs or Radio Stations at the time, or a young lady putting on her make-up, or a young learner driver out with his Dad taking a chance?

I'll make one presumption here that you are free to question .... an older driver doing 50 mph on a Motorway is probably giving 99% (there's always room for improvement) of his attention to the road ahead and all other road users around him.  Can you say the same for the younger folk doing 75 mph or more?

I can't accept that. I have two elderly parents, and both are liabilities on the road, as they'll rubber neck at anything or anyone. Can't accept that older people are more likely to have better attention. From my experience, the opposite is true, to the extent that I try and reduce how much driving they are doing. You'll get a mix of good and bad drivers at all ages. For every young speedester, you'll get a little miss/mr prefect doing everything by the book.

[pullhard]

The point that I was trying to make in a ham fisted way. Was that we are all guilty of bad driving at time.

Young people haven't got great experience of driving, but generally would have better reactions and sight than an older person. This would give them an undue sense of confidence resulting in higher speeds, without the experience to back this up.

Older folk have got a wealth of experience but because of older age haven't got the reactions or eye sight of a younger driver. In an attempt to be safer they would tend to drive slower. Which is also dangerous. 

When I was suggesting re-testing every 5/10 years as it would everyone a refresher of the standards we expected on the roads. Cars are MOTed, pilots are must attend training, HGV drivers the same. Pilots in charge of 1 tonne metal at 70, nothing.
As drivers we all get in bad habits compulsory training would make our roads safer

[brokencrossbar1]

I do an awful lot of driving, licence now for 20 years(not clean I might add but nothing in the last 10 years, therefore technically clean )  I have to say there are some serious whingers about.  I generally sit at the speed limit on the motorway/dual carriageway, if I have the kids in the car, I would drop by about 5 mph.  There are some really bad drivers out there but the reality is there are not that many.  If someone is sitting at 50 to 55mph they should be on the inside lane, if there are lorries overtaking them, let them(trust me a fair few lorries have their speed limiters de-activated so they are well fit to pump it on).  Guess what, the lorry will pull back in and then you can overtake them!  People must have very little to worry themselves in life the way the get so wound up on the road, chill the f**k out and trust me you'll get there anyway.  For what it is worth, if you are late for something and driving hard as a result, you are generally the reason you're late.