Well, been a long time since my last post, hasn't it? Not that there's been nothing happening, just that there's been so much happening I've barely been sitting down at the computer. Unfortunately, it's mostly work stuff I can't tell you about so you'll just have to imagine it for yourselves.
A sad day
Well, it had to come eventually. I bid farewell to my SS lease car, which I'd barely run in with just 4200 km on the clock. Holden made me give it back to them.... rotters! Still, it wasn't all bad - in exchange I got a bright red Monaro, so I think I'll find it in my heart to forgive them. Such are the crosses we bear.
Complicity
So, it happens that just last night I thought I'd take the Monaro (still need a name,
suggestions?) for an enthusiastic drive through the Adelaide Hills, which is a goldmine for drivers. Twists, turns, hills, very exciting roads. There's a few streets from my house to the open road, and on the way I saw a motorcycle policeman hiding his bike in the bushes beside the road. This is one of those roads where it's a single lane road, wide verge with with high fences beyond that and should really be zoned at 70, but it's zoned at 60. Speed trap, pure and simple as they come.
The sight of this policeman hiding in the bushes like a rat left a really bad taste in my mouth. I don't know why yesterday in particular, but it did. So, a little ways further along I decided I didn't feel like driving any more - the scoundrel act had turned me off so much - and turned around, determined to drive past him at 59 km/h as often as possible until I got sick of it.
Meantime, I was musing about
the post Cowboy George made to one of my previous rants. This wasn't a "Police Security" speed camera, this was a gin-u-wine, card carrying bona-fide police speed trap - the most contact anyone will ever have with our police force. You probably can't blame the plods on the beat for doing what they're told, but surely the people at the top of the police forces have the information and intelligence to see that what they are doing has been demonstrably ineffective in reducing our road toll for the last decade or so.
By allowing the police force to be manipulated to over-concentrate on minor speeding offences, more significant causes of crashes go under-targetted. This means that the death toll is higher than it might otherwise be, and that by their misaction they are responsible for deaths on our road.
Poetic Justice
When I drove back down the road, I could not find the policeman. "Ah ha!", I thought, "He's nabbed some poor bastard." I drove up and down that road a few times, looking for him, but he was nowhere to be found. Disappointed and frustrated twice that night, I gave up and headed home. Only to find that just around the corner, at the only traffic lights between my house and the open road, someone had just had an accident and all the police, ambulance and fire brigade units in the area were attending.
Bizarrely, it looked like the crash was because someone in a small green Daewoo had crashed into a "Just Cruisin" hot rod that was part of a Santa parade - there were 5 or 6 more hot rods parked just up the road. There were Santas eveywhere, pointing this way and that explaining how the crash had occurred. Kids getting lollies from the Santas who weren't talking to bystanders, firemen putting kitty litter on the road - Salvador Dali would have been proud of the strangeness of it all.
The cause? It looked like the person driving the Daewoo was too busy looking at one of the other Santa cars to see a bright yellow hot rod turning in front of them, and ran a red light. Speed had nothing to do with it. In fact, it wasn't one of the "Speeding" accidents that kill 30 or so South Australians every year, it was one of the "Not looking where you're going" accidents that kill 70 or so. (Defined as 37 from "Inattention" plus 30 from "disobeying road rules".) Maybe it was one of the "DUI" accidents that kill 40 or so of us every year.
But you don't see 2 policeman booking people for road rule violations for every speed camera you see.....
Procrastination
Is the reason it's been so long between posts. Even though I've been busy, it's not like I haven't had even 30 seconds to bash out a post. And it's not the reason I was going to write an essay on the subject for this post, but have decided to write this short note instead. That would be laziness. :)
