Safety
Where The Streets Have No…
Do you get fed up with the multitude of traffic signs and signals that constantly bombard you as you drive around town? Have you ever missed a turn-off or some vital piece of information (like a speed limit sign) because it’s just another sign amid hundreds? Or, to take another tack, do sometimes wonder if the people who put up signs think that you’re an idiot (e.g. the sign saying “Caution: Flooding” smack in the middle of a temporary lake caused by heavy rain… as if you hadn’t noticed that there was six inches of water covering the road)?
Perhaps it’s time that the authorities gave us all a bit of credit for having at least a modicum of common sense. No driver wants to hit another driver, a cyclist or a pedestrian, after all. This was the view taken by the authorities in the town of Bohmte, a town in western Germany that had been struggling with a bit of a traffic problem.
The traffic authorities of Bohmte had tried everything to stop motorists doing dumb things that endangered the lives of pedestrians and cyclists in the middle of the town. Speed traps, carefully designed crossings and all the usual measures just weren’t working. So they tried something completely different. Instead of sticking up more signs and more signals, they ripped them all out. They also took out the cycle lanes and the pavements (what our American friends call sidewalks). Only three rules were in place for this special “shared zone”: (1) everybody – including pedestrians, wheelchairs, skateboards and heavy trucks – has to give way to anything coming at you from the right at an intersection, (2) don’t park your car smack in the middle of the road and (3) you had to keep to the speed limit of 30 mph. (That’s about 50 km/h and the usual urban speed limit in Germany – it’s only on the Autobahns that the no speed limit thing applies. A German hitchhiker we once offered a sofa to tells us that the no limits rule on the Autobahn is only fun if you have a big Mercedes or Audi – if you’re puttering along in a tiny wee Fiat hatchback, you want to cringe as they all sweep past you… but I’m getting off topic.)
The authorities were nervous. What was going to happen? Were motorists going to continue to barge ahead and cause at least 50 accidents a year in this particular section?
The thinking behind this “shared space” concept was that if the usual familiar signs weren’t there, motorists would get a bit nervous and would become more alert to what was going on around them. When the traffic lights are green, you usually just surge on ahead, confident that nothing’s going to be in your way… until some idiot running the red light T-bones you. The fact that you weren’t at fault is small compensation for a spell in hospital and a broken bone or two. It’s even less consolation if you were a cyclist or a pedestrian. But if there’s nothing at the intersection to give you the green light, then what would you do? You’d slow down and check that there was nothing coming, kind of like pedestrians and cyclists have to do all the time (oh, yes you do have to check all the time if you’re a cyclist – cyclists are legitimate road users in the eyes of the law but not in the eyes of a lot of motorists.)
The idea first cropped up in the 1970s courtesy of a Dutch traffic engineer named Hans Monderman, who challenged the conventional thinking that people become safer drivers with more signs, speed humps, etc. Instead, he took the view that road users aren’t stupid and they don’t want to crash, so if you took away the things that say “if you don’t have a motor, get out of the way,” drivers would stop taking the road and their right of way for granted. To quote Monderman, “We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behaviour…The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”
And the concept seems to be working. What’s more, the idea is spreading. It’s even made it all the way over here to Australia. There’s a shared zone in Bendigo, Victoria, where there are no sidewalks/pavements for pedestrians and there’s a reduced speed limit in the city centre. Similar designs have cropped up in towns in Sweden (where traffic lights and pedestrian crossings were replaced with fountains and park benches), the Netherlands (where they took out the lane markings), Florida, the UK and New Zealand.
Shared zones usually have a bit of a different look to them. A lack of pavements and traffic lights is only the start. Usually, there’s something a touch more decorative on the road surface – interesting patterns of brick or stone, for example. There may be a bit more street furniture and other pretty things. It’s all supposed to scream “space designed for human beings not just machines”.
The idea does have some downsides. The biggest criticism comes from organisations for the blind, on the grounds that with a proper pavement, a blind person knows that he/she is safe from traffic. A blind person can’t see the traffic they’re supposed to give way to. The other criticism has come from a few cycling organisations, especially in the Netherlands, who have reported that some drivers have a tendency to bully cyclists, refusing to give way when they ought to yield to the cyclist on the grounds that if it came to a car-on-bike conflict, the bike always loses. Mind you, this sort of thing happens all the time even with all the traffic lights, lanes and Give Way signs in the world, as any cyclist will tell you.
But on the whole – I think it’s a great idea!
Safe and happy driving,
Megan
Driving With The Common Cold
Heaps of parents heave large sighs of relief when the summer break is over and the kids go back to school. There are, however, downsides. Downside number one is that Mum’s Taxi duty kicks back in, especially if school is too far for the kids to walk to but is not so far away that you get a school bus service (as happens in rural areas). Downside number two is that the coughs and colds start coming back home, especially when the weather seems to read the school calendar and decides to turn cooler the moment term starts.
Driving with a cold is not like normal driving. You’re not sick enough to avoid driving – it’s just a sniffle, for goodness sake, so you can’t really get out of it. Take a good bit of paracetamol or aspirin and you’re OK. Sort of.
It’s a wonder that they haven’t tried to ban or warn you about the dangers of driving with a cold yet. We all know about not drinking and driving, and the hazards of taking wacky baccy or worse before getting behind the wheel. For those who wouldn’t dream of overindulging in alcohol prior to driving or getting remotely near any illegal substances, they still warn us about not driving tired, as fatigue slows reaction times and increases the risk of falling asleep behind the wheel. Driving with a cold has its own hazards and risks.
For a start off, you get that general feeling of lethargy and malaise that creeps in when you are fighting off a virus. Pain in the sinuses and/or throat (if the aspirin hasn’t quite done its duty) imposes on your consciousness, sucking your concentration. Sipping one of the traditional remedies for this particular type of misery – a decent slug of whisky or brandy in orange juice – is, of course, out of the question when there’s driving to be done.
You’ve also got the more physical visible effects of a cold. You’ve got the runny nose, the sneezing, the snot and the coughing to cope with. These are difficult to deal with when you’re driving, especially in town when the traffic’s a bit heavy. You feel that drip pouring down your nasal passages and threatening to trickle out of your schnozz. The traffic is heavy and you need to make that crucial lane change, or you’re part way around a multi-lane roundabout or you’re just coming up to the lights and expect them to turn orange. Do you go reaching for your tissues or hanky and try to deal with the offending drip? Or will this take your attention off the business of driving at a critical moment? Or is it safer to just let the drip cascade down your face (eeeeeewww!).
Sneezing is worse. As we all learned from those trivial snippets that circulate around the place, it is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. You feel that inevitable prickle in the back of your nose, your chest expands as you draw a deep breath for the Ah, then you explode in the Choo, eyes closed and goodness knows what racing out of you at a fair clip (popular wisdom has it that a sneeze does about 160 km/h; Mythbusters puts it at 54 km/h – faster than you ought to be going in heavy traffic, anyway!). During that split second, your whole body is concentrated on the sneeze, not on the road. There’s no way you could react if someone raced across the intersection or slammed on the brakes in front of you. If you’ve covered your sneeze with the crook of your arm the way that the health boffins tell us to, you’ve only got one hand on the wheel at the time. If you haven’t, then you spray virus-laden moisture all over the steering wheel and possibly the inside of the windscreen. (Rub a bit of hand sanitizer over the wheel – something we probably all ought to do regularly anyway, when you consider how often we touch it). And let’s not even think about the thick yellow snot stage of a cold…
Coughing is probably an even worse hazard, especially if you get that dry tickly cough that just won’t go away and leaves you in uncontrollable paroxysms of hacking away again and again. Medications that control this sort of cough usually come with warnings not to drive or operate heavy machinery afterwards. However, uncontrollable coughing fits lasting a good ten seconds or more don’t exactly make you the most alert and responsive driver. Pulling over to the side of the road until your lungs have settled down might have to be the safest option.
So what’s a responsible road user to do? The obvious answer is not to drive at all when you’ve got a cold and to use this as an excuse if possible. However, we all know that there are times when you can’t plead the common cold as a way of getting out of your obligations. You have to pick up the kids from school or your friend from the airport. You have to drop off that important package. You have to get that big job finished. So you have to drive.
The best options are to take it slowly just in case, take routes that avoid high traffic if possible and keep your eyes open for handy places to pull over. Practice controlling coughs and sneezes before you have to do it in a critical situation. And keep the box of tissues on your lap for easy access.
Don’t forget to clean up the used tissues, and to disinfect the steering wheel and gear change knob when you’ve finished driving.
Safe, healthy and happy driving,
Megan
On The Road: the New Volvo Driver Is…..
As a freelance vehicle reviewer, amongst other things, I spend a fair bit of time on the road. As a driver safety and education promoter, I look at the habits of other drivers because, as a good driver, you should always be watching what’s going on around you. There’s plenty of non indication; swapping of lanes all of a sudden, without planning the merge; the usual colour blind drivers that believe red is green and so on. What stands out, for me, is how often it seems to be the same “kind” of person that is involved in situations such as these.
I’d say, by now, we’ve all heard the term “soccer mums”; these are the mothers that transport their and other kids around in a people mover vehicle, invariably a 4WD vehicle and invariably it’s a Prado. On the long but dead end road on which I live is both a high school (at the end of the road and therefore truly bad council decision making)
and a child care, both bringing plenty of traffic morning and afternoon. The majority of vehicle are SUVs along the lines of Prados and Volvo XC90s (ironically) with a few station wagons for good measure. The ones that consistently exceed the 50kmh posted limit are consistently the soccer mum driven SUVs.
When it comes to freeway driving and the failure to indicate, more often than not it’s two distinct groups; the P plater driver (who clearly should know better) or drivers over (roughly) 55. The quick mergers tend to be across the board. Social media chatter is a great source; each state claims they have the worst drivers due to xyz factors, which, to me, indicates a systemic failure of driver instruction Australia wide, especially at the P plate level. Sure, there’s a measure of personal responsibility that needs to be taken, responsibility that could be said to have been reduced as a safety factor thanks to the almost singular focus on speeding as a breach of road safety, plus an understandable frustration with poor road design and surfaces, however there’s a correlation between styles of driving and those that make the errors.
When it comes to the new Volvo drivers, my personal opinion is it’s those that drive SUVs and, as a general rule, it’s the soccer mums. And that’s worrying because of the cargo they carry: children.
CarTech: What Does This Mean?
Cars today, like most forms of modern technology, come with terms and names that can be bewildering to the casual observer. Yet a cars salesperson will rattle them of without explaining them or expecting you, the prospective buyer, to just “know” what it all means…
Something we’ve seen in cars for close to twenty years now, is this: SRS Airbag. By now we should all know what an airbag does (basically explodes a pillow from the steering wheel and other locations to provide a form of protection in an impact) however the other part of the name, SRS, is quite simple. Supplementary Restraint System; meaning it’s a backup to the two primary safety factors. One being you, the driver, being able to keep yourself out of trouble and the other is the engineering already built in.
ABS is another that’s become familiar; Anti-Lock Braking System. This is also pretty simple: when you hit the stop pedal, a combined system of hydraulics and electronics engage and disengage the brakes rapidly, preventing the brake pad from constantly gripping the brake disc and causing a skid. This aids the driver in steering the car (hopefully) out of a collision situation. Two, three, four channel sensors may be batted around and this refers to how many corners of the car are being read; for example a four channel sensor reads all four wheels whereas a three channel may read the two rear wheels separately and the front together. Many drivers interpret the pulsating of the barke pedal, from the system working, as a fault. 
Brake Assist is a complement to this; a computer sensor reads a potential emergency situation and automatically increases brake pedal pressure, so when a driver stabs the brake pedal at the last minute, there’s already enough pressure activated and also tries to minimise the braking distance.
TCS/ASR are for Traction Control System/Anti Slip Regulation. The most common applications are in decreasing wheel spin under acceleration, generally from stop signs and traffic lights or when the computer system connected detects lack of traction in certain road conditions. The system may reduce power or increase brake force at the wheel corner that’s losing grip. Traction control is also most often seen as an adjunct to ABS.
Torque Vectoring is one slowly creeping into the performance and four wheel/all wheel drive side; to use a standard front engined/rear wheel drive system, the rear wheels are driven by a shaft connected to the gearbox and differential (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_%28mechanical_device%29) which then sends engine’s output to the left and/or right wheels. As “diffs” are a purely mechanical environment, torque vectoring needs an electronic system to vary the amount of torque between the driven wheels. In a performance application, this would add more torque to a wheel that requires more grip to help in handling and acceleration.
Collision Avoidance is another; a radar system is employed by the car to read the gap between your car and a vehicle in front and if that vehicle is read as getting closer whilst your vehicle is not braking, it then sounds an alert. As a rule, the systems also offers the driver a variety of preset distances, adjustable by the press of a button.
If you’re in the process of buying a car and the salesperson says these and you’re unsure, ask them to explain it further; you deserve that courtesy.
Level 2, 9 Help Street