Looks like the current police tolerance for speeding over 4kmph above the limit won't become a permanent thing.
These stricter conditions will stay until the end of this month, then be reserved for holiday periods.
But no matter how diligent you are at monitoring your speed, you may still be breaking the law without knowing...it boils down to the wrong-sized tyres on your car.
It's all to do with the revolution of the tyre affecting the speedo. Y'see, the speedometer is not some hi-tech analytical contraption detecting the passage of your modus transportus past a given point by measuring air particle movement via quantum physics! If your car is wearing large tyres, they're taking longer to go around, therefore the speedo does not register correctly and it simply counts the number of tyre revolutions. A 5% increase/decrease in the height of tyres can alter your speedo reading by 5kmph...just enough to make you a borderline lawbreaker.
The Automobile Association’s Mike Noon says speedos are so unreliable, it would rather see the road safety focus go on improving roads rather than improving revenue: "We've called for $150-million to improve simple road safety initiatives. If we do that for ten years we will save eight lives a year, every year."
Police say the current speed tolerance reduction applies for February and public holidays only: "There is no consideration of making this a permanent reduced tolerance."
Motoring writer Clive Matthew-Wilson says the police are very quick to take credit when the road toll lowers over a holiday period: "But when it went up by 50% over Christmas they blamed the drivers. They can’t have it both ways. If this sort of enforcement works, the road toll would go down and stay down...but it didn’t." Maybe police have realised that a large proportion of law-abiding motorists do exceed that 4kmph margin inadvertently, but that chasing every one of them with prosecutions or fines simply bogs down the system, when they have much bigger jobs on their plate...
This should not be seen as a victory for those whoexceed limits to a marked degree (perhaps hit them even harder than now?) but simply sensible enforcement.
Of course, the big question is: how much is too much?
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Monday, February 13, 2012
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