If you live in, or have been to Australia, you'll know how insane the roads are. Endlessly long. Boring. Country roads with not much to see for miles and miles. Especially in country Victoria, where I live. If you have, you'll probably be as horrified as I am to find that the proposed speedlimit for country roads is now 80mph.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
Are they trying to kill us? Driving at 80kmph is enough to put anyone to sleep.
Okay sleeping might be impossible on a gravel road, and driving on it at 100 mph is idiotic as all you do is create corrugations and ruin your car and risk sliding out on a bend. If you're going to drive 100 kmph on black ice down a mountain, well, see ya later. However, for most country roads, 100 kmph is perfectly reasonable.
It's one thing to be brainwashed by the nanny state and say 'well, they're keeping us all safe' and learning to fucking drive. Most of them are due to people not paying attention and running off the road and are single car fatalities. Then there is a large proportion of motorcyclists - and many of which didn't hold a licence. And according to the TAC, it's about half half metro and rural - '48% occurring in metropolitan Melbourne and 52% in regional Victoria'. Why punish rural drivers?
Furthermore, compliance is an issue. It's almost impossible to police the vast areas of country roads. Then there's the argument that the government just doesn't want to spend the money fixing the roads, or fixing high accident areas, so a blanket lowering of the speed limit is the answer.
Sigh. So it's going to add a lot more time to my journeys, that's for sure. All because people fail to exercise common sense on the road. But it's always the case, isn't it? We get massive fines for speeding here and whilst we do the right thing 90 percent of the time, the one time we go 5 km over the limit we get booked. Meanwhile, we're watching people drive at phenomenal speeds, tailgating and otherwise dangerous driving and they seem to get away with it.
And if you live in Victoria, you just KNOW coppers sit over a rise, round a bend, just waiting to catch you. They are surreptitious (that one is for @honeydue) pricks.
I don't know, maybe I'm just annoyed as I live in a country where everything is monitored and fined, and it seems you can't breath without having to pay for it.
I was about to be super outraged by the proposed curfew between 10 pm and 5 am for drivers over sixty, since we're about 7 to 8 years off that ourselves, but turns out that's fake news. We must watch our outrage and fact check first. To what end such fakeries exist, I don't know.
I sure hope this one is.
With Love,
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I converted it and 100kph is 62 mph. Speed limit here is 65mph. 80kph is about 42mph and I agree, that's really slow!
Crazy, right? And like here, you have big roads going big places!
I can literally feel your frustration, so sorry! I do hope they increase it to a more reasonable speed. Its funny that we could really use this kind of structure in my country.
Why's that? Do you have speed limits at all or is just everyone doing what they want? What's your road toll like?
So, this isn't exactly general, but majorly, everyone just does anything they want. It is chaos over here, not everyone even obeys the traffic laws, it can get really annoying.
Ah yes, our cops are similarly surreptitious. I don't drive, but can't stand being behind slow people or moving slowly. I'm irritated by alliance. xD
Ha, don't get me started on being behind slow people. Did you ever read the post where I accidentally hit a woman's ankle in a DIy store because she was walking super slow and stopped in front of me?
I know I read a post from you about slow people, but I think I forgot about the ankle. I genuinely don't get it. Who has the time to be that slow? I was walking behind a woman in the supermarket yesterday, and she was walking like she was out strolling Champs Élysées - taking in the fucking sights and everything.
As you say, compliance is not certain. People will find their way around it and (hopefully) use common sense to determine the speed they feel good rolling at.
We have many speed limits in Ecuador, but not much enforcing, either. Besides the fact that most people here are really bad drivers and accidents occur no matter how slow the law says they should drive, most parts are limited by nature, anyway. The fastest I ever got as 180 km/h during the lockdowns in 2020. I had a special permit (bakers are first necessity, so I was allowed to deliver to my clients). That speed was only possible as nobody else was on the street, and the road was straight for 1km - that's a lot in Ecuador. Usually, it's curves everywhere.
Just like with the black ice mountain road - of course you can drive 100 km/h, but you'll do it only once.