2008-04-22

55 speeding tickets in one day?

Watching the ZBM news and the report of some 55 speeding tickets issued on Friday stunned me a little bit. I saw that the police were out and about Friday on the long stretches of road (of course they're not near corners and frequent accident spots, but that's another battle, another day), radar guns firing. It's interesting that they can only pull over people for speeding, not necessarily other offenses. For example, the law still says that headlights must be white, but we all see the cars and bikes with green, blue and other coloured headlights. Ah well.

What I didn't like was what the Premier (and Minister of Transport) was saying regarding needing to educate the public on unsafe driving. Sir, the time for education is over. It's been overdone. If there's no officers or traffic cameras about, people will run red lights, use 'third lanes' and speed without any worry. Focus needs to remain on enforcing the law that driving on the roads is a privilege, and removing the offenders from the road for a long time while hitting them in the pocket too.

It's Road Safety Week here right now, apparently. Hopefully the road collision rate will diminish at least for a short period.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Agree completely....'urging' people to drive safely is USELESS!
Why can't they (the police, Govmnt) understand this? We need more officers 'on the beat', on the roads, to enforce the laws with a HEAVY hand.....Then the concept "priviledge" will really take hold......It's not rocket science...