Double demerits this weekend

Apparently a lot of people still don’t wear seatbelt, which is amazing when you consider how effective they are, yet easy to use.

I know that I feel kinda weird driving without a seatbelt on. Even if it is just through a gate (where I have to get out and shut it) or moving a car up a driveway a few metres, seatbelts are so ingrained in my behaviour I put it on automatically.

Keeping my speed down on the other hand, has become increasingly hard to do since buying a fast motorcycle. Not necessarily because I am wanting to ride fast (that’s a whole other thing), but because I see an opportunity to overtake someone, do it, and kinda forget that in the hundred metres it took me to get past them and slow back down, I’ve done 50km/h over the limit. It is this behaviour that I think double discount weekends might actually address.

It would be so much easier if they just didn’t hand out licenses to morons.

Double demerits is a great and worthy tool, I wish they’d introduce the system on UK roads.

Apparently a lot of people still don’t wear seatbelt, which is amazing when you consider how effective they are, yet easy to use.

Yeah, wasn’t suggesting that it was somehow a new phenomenon, but the only way to fight “widely believed facts” like this is to keep calling them out. The hope being that gradually people will start to get the message.

What kind of surprises me is that they still feel the need to target seatbelt wearing. I was under the (quite probably incorrect) impression that that was a battle won long ago.

It’s been this way for many years. Want to drive on a weekend more dangerous than Christmas or Easter? Any weekend will do…

Personally, I don’t think the double demerits help much, you still see moronic driving.

More people will be on the roads this weekend which means the risk of roads accidents is higher

Oh really? Governments love to trot out the double demerits on the premise that holiday periods are far more dangerous. For 2006 and 2007 the average road toll was 4.37 and 4.42 per day. Over the Christmas periods for each of these years, it was 4.13 and 3.2 per day respectively. Other holiday periods tend to jump around a bit due to their shorter duration, but look to be lower than average just as often as they’re higher. This in spite of all the extra cars on the road, people on unfamiliar roads and the media feverishly tracking the toll each day as if Christmas brings some kind of road transport holocaust.
Now granted, these lower numbers are almost certainly in part because of the double demerit system and all the hype surrounding road safety at this time of the year. But statistically speaking, you’re ever so slightly safer if you get in your car on the holidays than any other day.