Canberra Black Spots

I think the problem with Che’s approach is in the final step. Canberra drivers aren’t too hot on thinking, especially about where cars are coming from.

Canberra roads expect drivers to merge on most major left turns, hence most accidents are caused by the many timid drivers who drive to the end of the merge lane, slam on the brakes and wait for all three lanes to clear before carefully edging out.

The impatient cut-everyone-off fully-sick drivers aren’t that great either, but nobody I know has actually crashed into a fully-sick driver.

Gibbo, that could be due to the fact that any section of road less than, equal to or greater than 180 degrees in Canberra is treated like a dodgem-car track by a small percentage of drivers.

Very few places in Canberra can be truly called a blackspot.
Any section of road less than 180 degrees seems to be classed as a blackspot in Canberra.

I go through the Lady Denman Drive-Parkway intersection twice a day. I am astounded at the number of near misses I’ve seen there, and I’m there for only 20-30 seconds at a time. It looks like some drivers assume that every car is either turning from LDD into the Parkway ramp, or vice versa. People forget that there is actually traffic that just goes along LDD, and it’s a 70 zone. Just yesterday afternoon a car turning right into LDD pulled out in front of a car heading north. The car heading north at about 60kmh had to scream to a halt.

I wouldn’t call the intersection a black spot. Visibility is pretty good. I reckon people are just too impatient. It’s not like there’s a line of rusted car bodies with skeletons in them sitting there waiting for a break in the traffic.

X

The downramp to Lady Denman heading south from the Parkway ends with a very sharp left. I’ve entered that corner with a little more speed than I intended on a few occasions and I’ve seen at least one accident where a car has overcooked it and collided with a car coming the other way.

I gather a ‘right turn only’ sign has recently? been planted on the other side of the underpass to stop cars from jumping off the Parkway and driving straight thru and avoiding having to move across to the left lane to head off to Belconnen. Apparently the police did a blitz recently and busted heaps of cars driving straight through.