Heading home this evening I witnessed a display of horrendous driving typical of too many Canberran drivers on country roads. The person was a caucasian male with a grayish beard driving a late 90’s model Mazda.
At about 5pm, driving away from Bungendore, up Smiths Gap, I caught up to a slow moving medium rigid truck struggling up the hill. One other vehicle behind me. The driver of the Mazda caught up to the vehicle behind me, and immediately overtook that vehicle and myself, despite a blind corner coming up. Fortunately no traffic came around the corner during this maneuver.
The driver then maintained a following distance of 1-2 metres behind the truck moving at 10-20km/h, at one point coming extremely close to running up the back of the truck when the truck slowed further whilst the driver changed down another gear.
After we rounded the corner, the driver of the Mazda overtook the truck, on double solid lines, with oncoming traffic approx 200 metres away… all when there was an overtaking lane 100 metres up the road.
I passed the truck, got to the top of the hill, and spotted the mazda less than a kilometre in the distance before I turned off.
This person was prepared to risk his life, his passengers life, my life, the lives of the people in the car behind me, the life of the truck driver and her passenger, the life of any driver that may have come around the blind corner during the first overtaking maneuver, and the lives of the people in the two oncoming vehicles in his second reckless overtaking maneuver, all so that he could gain a few hundred metres. Willing to risk killing or injuring up to 10 people, so he could save up to 30 seconds on his trip home. All of which will have been lost at the first set of traffic lights encountered in Canberra.
Why? There cannot be any valid excuse for being so selfish, and so negligent in any situation… the fact that he had so little to gain from his actions… his thought process is simply incomprehensible.
It is people like this that need to be removed from the road until they get their road safety priorities sorted. Yet with road safety enforcement being increasingly based on speed cameras, drivers like this are less and less likely to get their comeuppance… at least not until an innocent family is killed.
The most annoying thing… it’s almost certain this driver hasn’t thought twice about his actions, and would be of the opinion that he’s a safe driver who did nothing wrong.
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