It seems that every generation has the same refrain, “I’ve never seen worse driving”. Within the last fortnight I have seen two cars turn left at a red light, all number of cars routinely proceed through reddish/orange and red lights and, the coup de grace, – a white ute turning right without going around the round about.
With that background, on Friday I spent half an hour at my local café, which is situated at traffic lights, observing the traffic rather than boring myself silly looking through Google’s curated newsfeed on my phone. As you can see, it was an exceptionally scientific survey, but it yielded the following results:
- 2 clear red light infringements, multiple “on the borderline”
- About 15% of people seem to be on their phone while waiting at the intersection and sometimes when turning across traffic
- Some people don’t seem to realise that pedestrians normally have “right of way”, and
- Some people drive with Labradoodles on their lap, which is unfathomably stupid.
From an economic standpoint, I calculate that a couple of hours spent on my corner every week would probably pay the weekly wages of a police constable.
However, I hardly ever see the constabulary. I last saw a policeman about two weeks ago when he visited the café to pick up a coffee, having parked his police car in an Australia Post carpark. No big deal you may say, but casual abuses of privilege never go unnoticed.
Anyway, is the lack of police presence a function of a lack of crime in the area, a lack of manpower, a focus on more significant crime elsewhere or perhaps the police simply don’t think pinging people for traffic violations is a valuable use of their time, and anyway doesn’t make them popular.
I could be accepting of the first few reasons, but not the last. Distractions behind the wheel, and that is code for mobile use, is one of the reasons why major traffic accidents remain at very high levels – and, in terms of popularity, the police should probably watch some episodes of Australia Dashcam and see the public response to individuals being pinged for dangerous driving, driving through red lights, driving over double lines at high speed and emergency lanes. Its overwhelmingly… “yes, yes, yes!!!”
The problem is that we face one of these typical cycles – lax policing leads to increased levels of crime, petty and major, which leads to “law and order” elections and short-term tightening up. The alternative is that the police force simply maintain their focus on enforcement of all legislation, and don’t pick and choose between what they regard as important or otherwise. If legislation is inappropriate or badly targeted, get it deleted – policing also shouldn’t be entirely contracted out to cameras, that’s both uncomfortable and impractical, we just don’t have sufficient coverage.
Also, policing needs to be visible – including police actually walking, rather than driving, around.
