Quote:
Originally Posted by alpal
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I've 'wasted' 20 minutes per month on that site for many years. It's a horror movie!
I'm glad to say that I haven't experienced, in 47 years of driving, any of the worst behaviour displayed on DCOA and I only very rarely see behaviour which would 'pass muster' to be shown on the monthly highlights. Perhaps I'm just lucky but also there are a lot of cameras out there which only collect 15-20 minutes of 'good stuff' per month. I tend to refer to those who get on the highlights as the dumb 'people' of Australia
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I think you can separate the culprits on the videos into three main categories. First there are a small number of reasonable drivers who just have a bad moment. If their reactions are caught on camera they tend to be embarrassed and apologetic. We all make errors as we drive, mostly pretty small ones that have no consequences but once or twice in my life I just haven't noticed a stop sign or a car I should have seen earlier is suddenly too close to me. Thankfully it has never lead to anything (except perhaps a scowl from the passenger's seat) but these days I could easily wind up in the highlights video.
Secondly there are those who are just technically inept and shouldn't be driving. They often feature in car park waltzes where they take 5, 10 or 15 shuffles to get a car into or out of a parking spot, or fail to reverse park after 6 attempts, or hit parked cars, wind up in the garden or, in one delightful case, wipe their expensive boat off the trailer by hitting a post while accelerating rapidly out of a carpark.
The third category, however, is by far the largest and it is drivers with a poor *)&%(%in' attitude.
These are the pushers and shovers, high speed passing on back streets, the cutting off, running red lights, the wrong way through roundabouts etc etc. They are always angry and will blame and abuse the drivers they have wronged - lots of bird flicking. Doubtless some are drunk or drugged. In one case an apparently tired driver ran off the road to the left, recovered but wound up on the wrong side, got back into their lane and continued down the road drifting from side to side. Bad attitude. These people shouldn't be on the road. Some might be having a emotional meltdown due to stress, trauma or whatever. I hope they recover but while they are not in control of their emotions they shouldn't be driving. However I think the majority of angry, rude drivers on the videos are just too far gone to ever be on the road. We have probably all met people who are just angry at the world. In their mind someone is always doing something to them or has done something for which they must extract revenge. They tend to walk around muttering to themselves. Of course many of these type do things which see them off the road (banned, injured, imprisoned) but I wish there was some way to screen for a bad attitude before someone gets hurt.
I've tried to notice whether drivers of certain types of car are over-represented in the videos but I can't say I'm convinced. One month there might be an abundance of crew-cab utes (my mate hates these and their drivers) but the next it's hot fours or V8 utes or clapped out wrecks or just ordinary plain family cars. Mostly heavy vehicle drivers are the victim of the idiots but one month there was four total clangers from semi drivers.
Just to finish on a lighter note. There was a convertible sports car driving on a motorway when it started raining. So they stop in the right hand lane, raise the roof and then continue. No sense of entitlement there.
