By EWAN KENNEDY
14 May 2007

Hallelujah! At long last a road safety campaign that focuses on what's happening in the real driving world. The Queensland government has announced a major push on making drivers keep left unless overtaking on multi-lane roads.

Motorists are delighted with the news and the media has picked up the message with a great deal of enthusiasm. We have seen drivers being interviewed on TV as they wait at traffic lights. They all express their pleasure at what they hope will be the demise of the fast-lane hogs who stuff up traffic flow and create irritation in other road users by their selfish behaviour. And everyone I've spoken to is most impressed.

Because the police have been asked to keep an eye on the road hogs and to book them if they do the wrong thing.

I suspect the majority of fast-lane hogs are simply unaware of the problems they are causing. Hopefully this campaign will wake them up to that fact and they will do the right thing without getting a ticket.

But there are some people who seem to delight in holding up other drivers. This is often a direct result of the governments’ ‘drive-slowly’ campaigns. A few drivers feel it’s their duty to slow down others, because the government has preached endlessly to them that slow is good.

I haven’t seen any response from the slow drivers to this keep-left message at this stage. Wouldn’t it be just great if there weren’t any complaints? But I do anticipate some saying that encouraging others to overtake will only create more crashes.

Which is something with which I strongly disagree. Because I have been on the record for years in saying that sensible, attentive driving and courtesy between road users are the best ways to cut crashes.

Driving behaviour is a two-way street and the fast drivers have to do their bit as well. If the driver in front of you is a bit slow at overtaking on a multi-lane road it doesn’t make sense to hassle them by driving too close. Tempting as it may be to do so, the feeling that you will hurry them along by tailgating is wrong. Indeed, it can be counter productive.

Holding back to a distance that lets the guy in front know you want to get past, but which doesn’t intimidate them, is much more likely to see them move out of your way as soon as it’s safe to do so.

At this stage I know of no plans by road-safety authorities in other Australian states to pick up on the keep left on overtaking message. Let's hope it does. And even it if doesn’t, Australians are inveterate travellers and changes in one state could soon result in positive driving improvements throughout the country.

By the way, you may have noticed I have used the words ‘fast-lane’, rather than ‘overtaking lane’ throughout this opinion piece? That was quite deliberate, because that’s the term used by drivers in the real world. And this campaign is a genuine attempt to improve driving in that real world, not in the theoretical academic world of stopping distances and kinetic energy that has failed us in the past.

ewan@marque.com.au