CHARLES WOOLEY Why speed signs are driving him mad
Constable Gowan was a pleasant and polite traffic cop, youthful looking but with a sprinkling of grey hair in his short dark beard to suggest some maturity. He was articulate and better presented than your average traffic cop. Had I been shooting a commercial for Tasmania Police, this open-faced officer could create a most agreeable public image.
I was among about five cars pulled over, but I wasn’t at all worried. I had set my speed control at 95km/h for the 100km/h speed limit, so speeding surely wasn’t a concern. Indeed, I was happily prepared for a random breath test as it was late morning and I hadn’t been drinking. It is a joyous thing to blow in the bag when you’ve had not a drop.
The story now becomes all too familiar in our curious state, where the authorities do the very best they can to keep the speed limit a secret from the motorist. Apparently I had been clocked doing 95km/h in an 80km/h zone by Constable Gowan’s mate, hidden behind a bush down the road.
Arbitrarily, the speed limit had changed and I had failed to spot the one sign that indicated this. Perhaps I had been concentrating on the middle of the road instead of the side of the road, or perhaps I had been distracted by oncoming traffic in those few seconds when the one and only sign flashed past.
Spotting the traffic sign is the most fatiguing aspect of driving here in Little Cuba. The Politburo ordains arbitrary changes of speed limits, which make no sense to anyone outside the State Treasury.
You will probably know, to your great cost, places where several trivial changes of speed are demanded in what seems a ridiculously short distance. But miss the only sign and you are poorer and the state the richer.
I tested the nice policeman on this matter. “I must have missed the sign, officer, but what observable changes in road conditions might I have noticed that should have warned me of the need for a 20k reduction in speed?”
“Well, Mr Wooley, I really can’t say,” the constable said. “But that’s for the road authorities to decide and for me to enforce and for you to take notice of.”
A much more engaging answer than the usual, “Look, mate, I don’t make the laws, I just enforce them.” Although, when I consider it now, it’s the same message, just more reasonably put. As my mum used to say, “Civility costs nothing.”
This bloke really was the good cop from Central Casting, especially when he told me if I haven’t had a speeding fine in the last three years I might be “let off with a caution”. I am still sweating on that, but it is my sorry experience that whenever I get close to regaining all my points, fate and inconspicuous signage conspire to bring me down again.
I know some nark will add “and speeding, Charlie”. Don’t bother writing in. As a student of the letters to the editor section of this paper, I know a lot of Tasmanians have grown to enjoy the convict lash over the past 200 years.
Recently, a correspondent argued that fines should be means-tested. As a gainfully employed member of society, my fine should be higher than that of an unemployed person. This presumably would have the social benefit of bashing the taxpayer while rewarding indolence.
Someone else called for increased random breath-testing, again presumably because we are such a deeply flawed people, we must always be on the turps.
Yet another writer wanted to give cops the power to charge people who were texting while walking in the street. Well, at least that’s not beating up the poor old motorist again.
But instead of inventing new crimes, why doesn’t someone write to the paper simply asking for clearer indications of the speed limits on our roads?
It’s hard to convince some Tasmanians that simply informing people of the rules could be even more effective than the convict lash. But if we knew the rules, we might avoid the fines, and the money wouldn’t come rolling in, as it now does.
This is probably one for Freedom of Information legislation but I wonder how many of our rulers and regulators get ‘done’, as I claim to have been done, for inadvertently speeding? Do the people who dream up these regulations ever fall into their own speed traps? In conversation with Constable Gowan, I wondered who could ever drive in this state, in the absence of conspicuous signage, intuiting the speed limit while never losing a point? He replied without hesitation, and I liked him enough to believe his answer.
“Me,” he said. “I’ve never had a speeding conviction.”
I would have liked to learn his secret, but with a growing line of miscreant convictdescended wilful speeders queuing for punishment behind me, I had to move on.