Category - World

This Daily Mail story could have been a whole lot funnier – but it’s still amusing in its own way.

A Norwegian driver swerved to avoid a moose on a remote mountain road – and drove into a bear instead! The bear is being tracked as it appears to have been seriously injured (the driver was OK), but you can see how this could have been much funnier if it was used as the script for, say, a Warner Brothers cartoon, and if the Coyote or Daffy Duck was driving the car. And if the bear got angry…

Apparently, the moose was demonstrating a level of safety awareness typical of its kind by walking in the road at midnight, while the bear was busy going about bear business off to the side somewhere. Incidentally, if you Google images for “moose in road” you’ll be surprised to discover that this animal seems to spend more time walking on tarmac than it does in grass.

Joking aside, moose accidents can be very serious, and often fatal (for the driver as well as the moose). After all, a typical moose can weigh over half a tonne, which is at least half the weight of a normal car.

It reminds me of the time a herd of deer ran out in front of traffic in the Cotswolds, and I saw the engine fall out of a Transit van after it ran into them at 50-60mph. A typical female deer probably weighs in at a tenth of what a moose does.

I always tell this story to my pupils when we cover the Emergency Stop as part of the emphasis on the dangers of speed and lots of mass.

This is an interesting one – I’m still split over it.

In New South Wales, Australia, learner drivers have to complete a log book during their training. They have to do 120 hours of driving, which has to be signed off (but not even by an instructor, as I understand).

The current Road Minister, Duncan Gay, says:

“For too long governments have taken the opportunity, if there’s an accident somewhere, to automatically add extra hours to the learner’s permit time.”

Now, in part I agree with that. Accidents among young drivers are not due to inadequate tuition. But it is also a dig at the previous government – so you immediately wonder what point Gay is making. Is he genuinely of the belief that accidents are unfairly blamed on learner tuition and learners per se, or is he simply making vote-winning small talk?

Referring to the change – where learners will be able to knock 20 hours off their required driving hours if they take a driving safety course (which is non-compulsory), he then adds:

“(This) stops parents and children currently becoming criminals because 120 hours is just way too much.”

Mr Gay said he hoped the initiative would deliver a more realistic timeframe for L-platers and stop the some of them from fudging log books.

Ah! So instead of actually dealing with the problem (the accidents), his party is simply going for one of the symptoms – which, coincidentally, will be popular among some of the electorate. They want to move the goalposts for what constitutes “criminal behaviour” instead of dealing with the fact that people are simply happy to behave as criminals.

Not a good sign for the future, Mr Gay.

To make matters worse, the course learners can go on to cut those 20 hours is not free (Gay says they will be “affordable”) – and they will even be able to cut another 20 hours if they take “professional” courses. I’m sure that those will be even more “affordable”.

I think the real attitude to driving is summed up in the next paragraph:

“Further options to assist learner licence holders in remote, lower socio-economic… communities meet learner driver log book hours will also be considered,” Mr Gay said.

Votes, votes, votes. What on earth is the point of arguing that safety isn’t implicated by cutting driving hours, when you’re immediately going to make concession upon concession for minority groups? It is the poorer people who are both prepared to break the law, and financially inclined to do it – and their societal attitude certainly doesn’t push them towards being safe drivers.

Looks like the Aussies have the same problems with government involvement in driver training that the UK does. I wonder if Mr Gay gets his information from his daughter, like our transport minister does?

Incidentally, the proposed changes are reported slightly differently depending on where you look.

North America has not previously been known for its roundabouts (used as road junctions). As recently as 2006, it was clear that there weren’t many (if any, prior to the story) in the USA – but that they were being introduced and tried out.

The Americans appear to be taking them very seriously, because you certainly don’t get sites like this about UK roundabouts (dead link removed).

Even just under a year ago, there were reports that roundabouts were proliferating and drivers were “confused” – though I sense a certain amount of patronising going on there, as Autoblog appears to have chosen to ignore the fact that anyone will be confused by anything new (drivers in the UK can take more than 15 years to stop treating a road the way it USED to be laid out after it changes). However, in Maryland alone there were nearly 200 roundabouts according to that report, which is probably more than there were in the entire US only 10 years earlier.

In July this year, the BBC did a story about the “British roundabout conquering the US“. I’m not sure you could call them “British” roundabouts – at the very least, you go round the American ones the other way, so it would be better to call them after another country that uses them AND drives on the right-hand side of the road (but that’s not paternal enough for the Beeb). The story says that around 3,000 have been built in the last 20 years – and it also points out that some states consider them to be “undesirable European imports”, likely to put up taxes and increase accidents. Ironically for those states, the BBC story refers specifically to the Californian town of Carmel, where their purpose has been to remove traffic lights and their associated running costs, and to cut pollution.

I like the quote from a correspondent in the Wall Street Journal:

This is a culture predicated on freedom and individualism, where spontaneous co-operation is difficult and regimentation is resisted.

You see it in the way Americans get in line, or as the Brits say, queue. We don’t do that very well.

Behind the wheel, we’re less likely to abide by an orderly pattern of merging that, though faster for the group, may require an individual to slow down or, God forbid, yield.

[Americans tend to be orthogonal in their thinking and behaviour.]

We like right angles, yes and no answers, Manichean explanations. Roundabouts require more subtlety than we’re used to.

My answer would be that assuming there’s nothing wrong with you at a genetic level, live with it. It’ll do you good.

But the main reason I wrote this was that a news item just came through about local driving schools in Ontario, Canada having just started to include them on their lessons now that more are appearing over there (dead link removed).

Police and planners say that they are proven to reduce accidents and cut pollution (the American states touting that nonsense I mentioned above should take note). But there are still problems:

…but North Americans are still trying to understand them. So the Windsor Police held an information session Monday at the new Erie and Parent roundabout to teach drivers the proper way of entering and exiting.

I didn’t realise that Canada didn’t use them or have many until I saw this. They’re now covered in the Canadian equivalent of our Highway Code (dead link removed).