If you’re lucky enough to have cruise control, summer highway driving can be fairly straightforward.
The only tricky part? How willing are you to bend the rules?
You can get on the Trans-Canada Highway, speed right up to the 100 kilometre an hour limit and set your cruise control to hold that speed. Maybe you cheat just a little tiny bit, knowing that the police give a bit of a buffer to speeders. So, you set it at 110 km/h, though not without maybe a tiny twinge of conscience if you’re a card-carrying member of the rule-abiding club.
And off you go in the flow of traffic, comforted in your daring behaviour by the fact that much faster vehicles are dusting by you in the passing lane on a regular basis.
Actually, no — not on a regular basis. On a near-constant basis.
Anyone who drives on the TCH knows from personal experience that there are plenty of vehicles that aren’t just speeding but are flat-out ignoring both speed limits and safety.
Obeying the rules — and even going a little faster than the rules — actually makes you feel like you’re a road hazard, with a steady stream of cars, sports utility vehicles and pickup trucks zooming up tight behind you before pulling out into the passing lane (occasionally even signalling their intentions with a flick of the turn signal).
Anyone who drives on the TCH knows from personal experience that there are plenty of vehicles that aren’t just speeding but are flat-out ignoring both speed limits and safety.
Pickup trucks are far from the only lead-foots on the road, but with the power that many of the full-sized pickups have, they’re certainly among the regular culprits.
Lately, the numbers involved have been more than staggering.
Here’s an RCMP news release about a speeder pulled over on the TCH near Pasadena on July 10: “At approximately 7 p.m., an officer was set up conducting speed enforcement along the highway and observed a vehicle travelling at a high rate of speed, passing other motorists. A radar reading of 169 km/hr was obtained and the vehicle was pulled over by police. The driver, a 21-year-old Corner Brook man, was ticketed for the excessive speed. He was also issued a driver’s licence suspension and the car was seized and impounded.”
Last week, the RCMP had two cars pulled over near Butterpot Park for driving eastbound at 156 km/h, when a Honda Civic travelling west passed the police at 175 km/h: “The driver of that vehicle put the window down and looked at the officers while driving by,” the RCMP reported.
To be brutally frank, if you’re travelling at 40, 50 or 60 km/h above the speed limit, the traumatic results that can occur can hardly be described as “an accident.” With that kind of disregard for safety, there has to be another term.
Pull them over, take their cars, fine the heck out of them. It’s an easier lesson.
