Had to walk across a 1 lane (either way) main road, well signposted with a pedestrian crossing. I walk one way, go to walk across and the car slows down at a distance away where you would expect the car to stop. I go to walk, and he floors it. Wasn't even a hotted up commodore or anything, just a small car.
So I step back and he thunders past I go to walk again and a transperth bus hammers across in my face. And the car after it.
Cross, go to shop, come back.
Mitsubishi on the other side stops, but this woman on her phone in a holden equinox is still clearly going to run me over the other way.
So as she goes over a pedestrian crossing at about 55kph (still hasn't looked up from phone in 25+ metres) I reach out and smash my hand onto the side of the car and yell after her
"You missed me you b***h!"
Of course that nearly backfired as she just about ran off the road.
Drive home, a triton ute blasts through a 4 way intersection at 80 in a 50 zone (his side has the stop signs), watch a mercedes s class (though only divine intervention or automatic braking) avoid a 70+kmh (60 zone) rear end collision with a mini that I had identified as stationary and waiting to turn right a good 100m before.
Plus there are curbside collections on - the number of people who think it is fine to either: Stop in the middle of the road and get out drive at 5kph and not let you past or have so little spacial awareness that they hit the skids and either try to reverse into you or do a U turn
Astounds me
Edit, forgot the learner driver at 8am kamikazing across three lanes of traffic to make a right arrow to do an illegal U turn.
As an aside, I obviously pay too much attention to the road as I drove past the below sign for the last two weeks and only just actually read it today
Hi Tyler, I don't drive around that much anymore since the pandemic started and I try and avoid peak hour traffic but from what I see Victorian drives seem a bit more tolerant and mostly stick to the speed limits. I guess all the cameras have had an effect. Very few would drive through a pedestrian crossing
I think, in some places, the police have been busy dealing with other fallout from CoVid-19 and haven’t had the resources on the ground. People have got away with certain things that wouldn’t normally have been tolerated because there hasn’t been the active policing to pull them up. Having not been pulled up the behaviour becomes normalised.
It’s a bit of a systematic problem. I know, around here, we have had a substantial increase in dangerous driving post lockdown. Some of these people also treated isolation as an opportunity to take the legal exhaust system and catalytic converters off their cars and replace them with illegal, loud, aftermarket systems. They bring these cars out after dark and race them around our roads.
Several people I speak with have noticed these cars but it’s hard to get action. They often have different plates front and rear, no plates, obscured plates or stolen plates so even when a car is reported there’s no outcome possible. The police haven’t needed to do “patrols” in some areas in recent years but I think more visible policing might be needed for a while to get the situation back under control.
I've spoken to the authorities on Tyler's behalf and they assure me the new pedestrian signs will be installed tomorrow for the safety of all Australians.
Seriously though it's the same everywhere , around here it's the opposite pedestrians walk in the middle of the road or cross the road without looking ,I don't mind waiting for people to grab something quickly of the side of the road when it's impossible to park anywhere .
I just went to local garage 5.30am dark today. A guy was riding a pushbike along a 80/100km main road without a taillight....... he did have a light coloured jacket on........ speedy
........................Keep your blades sharp......................
I was thinking more statistically , wasn't going to compare the roughly 500,000 to 6000000 , I was wrong anyway , when looking at the stats ,road fatalities per 100,000 in all states ,Tassie was 2 nd worst and ACT was the safest.
The Targa Tasmania seems to get a few ,just recently a driver was killed in a crash , The Brisbane man is the fourth competitor killed in the race in the past two years.
I'm going off topic here, but when it comes to "what's wrong with people?" I wonder this all the time on auction sites like ebay. Recently saw a vintage mower advertised for just $90. Instead of a buyer snapping it up at this ridiculous price, he decided to start bidding. Pretty soon there were 4 buyers, then 6 then 8, all locked in an intense bidding war. They ran it up to over $350. Guess what? Then buyer got cold feet and backed out of sale, refused to pay etc. and stuffed buyer around. Second highest bidder was offered the item but said he was no longer interested and wanted it for the original asking price. Crazy, stupid people is all I can say.
Yep, Australians wanting a near freebie as buyers and platinum for their crap as sellers on the second hand market. That behavior is borderline infantile. Also I think Ebay attracts a concentration of people with that thinking and results like that speak for themselves.
I think people reneging like that are breaking the law and could have legal action brought against them by the seller.
Ahh, if only victa had kept producing the thumblatch catcher series, they would be in better shape today!
There are a few of those sellers on eBay and Gumtree. Ask them a question and you are more than likely to cop abuse as an answer. Some of them make it clear they have no time at all for buyers but at the same time they want top dollar for their rusty old bits and pieces. One notorious seller uses ebay for his advertising but will not accept payment through ebay checkout. He demands that the sale go ahead privately. I always get the feeling some of these fellas must be sitting on mountains of scrap metal behind a ten foot high fence patrolled by a mangy old cattle dog with three legs and one eye, and they spend their days loosening up nuts and bolts to free up a few very rusted or corroded parts to flog off to the punters on ebay. Good on them I suppose. I guess it keeps them out of the pub and a few are making a good living out of this, while also constantly crying poor and complaining that ebay is robbing them blind. I always find it interesting that this "type" of seller often treats buyers as if they should be begging and grovelling at their feet because only they possess these sought after parts of immense rarity and value. So we must respect them and not quibble about the price, just accept whatever they are willing to offer us for whatever is in our wallets, at the same time making it clear that we are getting the bargain of a lifetime while they are the ones who are getting ripped off. In some ways it is true that in some cases they are sitting on gold mines of rare parts, in other ways they are simply cannibalizing rusty, worn parts from a scrap heap and trading it as "gold", while being generally obnoxious towards their buyers.
Vint_mow, The best Psychologists in the world can't work out how some people think so no point in us mere mortals trying to work it out. I just say to myself "idiot" and just move on
