Christeph: On the Lam

The Australian highway patrol doesn’t have it, apparently, despite cruising the roads in cars that would look right at home in NASCAR. Two days of driving in Australia was enough to impress upon us what a serious matter road safety is in this country. One need only drive for minutes before being bombarded with a plethora of signs and oddly catchy yet morbid slogans (”Crashes kill Christmas!”) all designed to instill in the driver a healthy respect for the posted speed limit. The highway began to take on a Big Brother-esque feel, as signs scolding “How fast are you going now?“, appeared with astonishing frequency. Adding to my paranoia, speed cameras hovered ominously by the side of the road. We passed not a few drinking and driving checkpoints, where random cars were pulled over to test drivers’ blood alcohol content.

Not all of the preventative measures involved government monitoring and scare tactics. You can regulate yourself, too! If you’re feeling less than alert, the Australian highway is dotted with Stop. Revive. Survive. pits, where you can score some free coffee from a cheery volunteer before being sent on your way.

You would think with all of these mechanisms in place that we would have been super-vigilant, dutiful drivers, and thus immune to interstate mishaps. That would be true if we weren’t so very unfamiliar with the geography. If we hadn’t been gawking at all the crazy Fauna crossing nets suspended high over the road, or marveling at a highway which accomodated both bicyclers and U-turns. The one thing we didn’t notice was how fast we were supposed to be going. Imagine our dismay when we realized that what we had thought was a 100kph zone was actually only 80kph… a fact driven home as we whizzed by and subsequently caught the attention of a patrol officer. We watched in our rear-view mirror with horrified silence as he made a U-turn (in one of those handy bays), turned on his siren, and summarily pulled us over.

Assuming the gentleman who pulled us over was representative of officers nationwide, I will say this for the Aussie police: they are exceedingly pleasant. After a quick chat, he popped back to his patrol car with a “won’t keep you long, folks”. When he returned a moment later, he handed over our hotel address (we had only been able to produce the name when asked). What service! Unfortunately, he also handed over a ticket: 150 AUD for 14 kph (8.5 mph) over the speed limit.

Crashes may kill Christmas. But tickets tick off tourists.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 22nd, 2009 at 6:15 pm and is filed under EverythingElse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.