Faster, better…

Posts Tagged ‘Aggressive Driving’

(EyeOnAnnapolis.net) An Annapolis City police officer crashed his motorcycle on the way home from work late one May evening. The article at EyeOnAnnapolis has some rather “eye-opening” facts about the crash and driver. Where are the example setters?

Read the entire story at EyeOnAnnapolis.net.

(From Examiner.com via DIGG) The Examiner reports on speed camera legislation in Maryland. This topic is of interest to DougWeb. We are for it and against it. We are for it since our culture in Maryland allows everyone to break the traffic laws. A speed camera catches everyone because by its nature it is impartial or least we hope that those reviewing the photographs keep it that way. It would not be correct for speeding government vehicles and their drivers to escape citations nor would it look good to ignore certain types of vanity plates like an manned radar trap might. When enough people get these citations perhaps our roads will be safer.

On the other hand, speed cameras are intrusive and we should not have to go to this extreme. All people have to do is drive safely and crash less and the idea would go away. Unsafe drivers keep the speed camera debate alive.

Maryland has an unsafe driving culture and everybody is involved in it. As long as we continue to drive like we are all omnipotent someone is going bring up speed cameras.

Read the details: http://digg.com/d1sf6h

SOMD.COM is reporting that, Charles County Cops Target Seatbelt Violations During May. What I would rather see is twenty-four by seven aggressive driver enforcement everywhere. These seat belt events are peripheral to the proximate cause for most accidents – aggressive driving.

It’s virtually impossible to drive ten miles in Southern Maryland without having an aggressive driver less than one car length from your back bumper. People no longer stop at stop signs and those that do (when they stop behind me) wave wildly and angrily because I did stop.

What I’d like to see are the drivers of vehicles with police and firefighter vanity plates driving the speed limits and stopping for stop signs. Police cruisers need to be operating at safe speeds and only taking those extra risks with emergency lights activated. Stop sign enforcement at high risk intersections needs some serious attention. When was the last time you actually saw anyone in Southern Maryland STOP at a stop sign? . The colloquial speeds on neighborhood streets need to be closer to the actual limits and people must stop at red stop lights – period.

There are few example setters for traffic safety on Maryland highways. Driving in Southern Maryland is very dangerous. Each day I drive I have to be prepared to drive defensively. Law enforcement on our highways seem limited to radar speed traps. Aggressive behavior is mostly ignored. (I even see police vehicles in lines of vehicles all following at unsafe distances – too closely.  This means serious offenders may never get a ticket and these serious offenders WILL cause an accident later. Anarchy rules  on Maryland’s roads and highways.

We have enough dangerous behavior on our roads to keep traffic cops busy and traffic schools busy for months to come. It could even be a viable long-term revenue stream!  It’s time for the various police agencies to end political correctness and to stop patting each other on the back and get some real traffic enforcement done.  All we seem to see in Maryland each and every year is the hype about “Click it or ticket.” Seat belt enforcement events briefly mitigate the carnage and remind only a very few they need to be wearing seat belts. These events are designed for politically correct media exposure but do not deal with the proximate causes of traffic deaths.

I’d much rather the police were after the SERIOUS HAZARDOUS MOVER: following too closely, excessive speed, failure to stop at stop signs, driving while inattentive,  failure to stop at a red traffic lights, blasting through intersections at the last minute, passing at high speed on the right, passing in no passing zones, obvious enraged driving, and driving while intoxicated. It would not hurt to have a traffic division dedicated to driving enforcement.

Get out there and deal with aggressive driving!  Click it ot ticket only mitigates the carnage for a brief period and does not deal with the public safety problem on our highways.

(CalvertNews.info 032309) – Another fatal crash at Jewel Rd and Rt 260. Read the details at CalvertNews.info. Young driver violated dead driver’s right of way making a left onto the highway.

(Ed note: Having had a family member in a serious highway crash, I would be interested to know the contributing factors as well as the primary collision factors. Did the driver coast through the stop sign? If he stopped did he look both ways? Was anyone on a cell phone? Stop sign compliance in Maryland is almost non-existent for right or left turns. What’s missing from this article is what behavior changes might have prevented this collision and that a preventable collision is not an accident.”

Apparently in Maryland it was legal, until February 20 of this year, to change lanes without signaling. It all makes sense now. Everyone drives like they are omnipotent NASCAR racers. Even police don’t signal. Well Maryland is finally out of the dark ages realizing what a rolling multi-ton pile of metal can do to the human body–many deaths later. It is now illegal to change lanes without signaling. This should be one more tool in a police officer’s fight against aggressive drivers. Three violations in a row are required for reckless aggressive driving citations and one of those in the state of California has always been failure to signal when changing lanes.

I’m happy that this little over sight was corrected. Now it will, unfortunately, take generations to bring Maryland drivers up to par with the safer states. Are there safer states? Post for another time.

Read the rest of the story.

A writer at Business Week wrote back in 2006: “Not going with the flow. Good drivers have one habit in common — they don’t obstruct the flow of traffic by adamantly driving at or below the posted speed limit when it’s clear other cars (and traffic in general) is moving faster. Such drivers mistakenly believe they’re in the right, legally speaking (“I’m doing the speed limit!”) but in fact they are impeding the flow of traffic, which is also illegal in most states. Safe drivers try to drive within 5 mph of the prevailing speed of the cars around them, and yield to faster-moving traffic if they’re uncomfortable about keeping up with the pace or driving a few mph faster than the posted limit.”

This is just nonsense. Speed limits are determined for a reason. Those reasons usually mean the road ahead and normal or even extreme prevailing conditions dictate that the limit on a certain roadway is as posted. Calling out someone for driving fifty in a fifty mile-per-hour zone when the colloquial speed limit for a highway may be an unsafe twenty miles per hour over the limit is moronic, unsafe, and just plain dumb.

Adding an additional five miles per hour is not going to keep the road killers happy either. Unsafe drivers are often unsafe at any speed. Driving fifty five in a fifty will not please most of Maryland’s aggressive drivers. They want to drive seventy miles per hour the rest of us be damned. A study last year in the UK showed that tailgaters tailgate to force drivers in front of them to speed up! The safer driver obeying the speed limit is not impeding traffic. The safer driver is not giving in to unsafe bully tactics that affect everyone’s safety. Impeding the flow of traffic is driving slower than than posted limit when conditions do not dictate a slower speed.

Aggressive drivers do not determine speed limits especially on two-lane highways, the highway department does. What’s next following Business Week’s logic? Are we supposed to drive the speed limit in driving rain and snow? Is the presence of black ice enough to slow us down or do we please the unsafe driver behind us? I intend to drive to live and to obey the law. I will not risk my family’s safety to please a bizarre belief that driving the speed limit is impeding traffic. That’s just nuts.