ANother Example of the Decrepid RTA's Abilities

Well, after my last drum on the RTA and the incredulous lack of talent in their ranks regarding road safety, I offer their latest crowning achievement.

The P Plater vehicle restrictions.

We all know what a crock these are and the best example is probably that if you have a Merc C180 (110kW) your P plater can't drive it, but if you have a Merc C320 (190 odd kW) - basically same car much more power they can. because the ban is on supercharged cars and the like - not anything about performance.

So, as yet unpublished information will be of interest to some of you. Sensing just how pointless and poorly developed these bans are the Staysafe Committee brought senior RTA people to Committee (3rd or 4th July 2005 from memory) and after swearing them in the first question was basically along the lines of "What research/proof/data/information has been used to develop/justify/implement these bans and show they will achieve any benefits in road safety (in terms of death/injury etc)?"

The RTA in their usual mystified fashion could only answer that they had none of the above (interesting especially since Victoria has had bans on high performance cars for many years and therefore by inference has no data to prove these bans save lives or reduce crashes). Apparently Staysafe seriously considered ending the meeting at that point however without seeing the as yet unpublished reports the RTA elected to continue with their usual dribble. However, Staysafe is reportedly very unimpressed with the bans themselves, as well as the inability to even enforce these bans (for example, the Police DO NOT have the power to simply pull over a P plate driver and ask for a licence and cross check against the vehicle's exemption if any).

It is a sad world when idiots such as those that populate the RTA Road Safety management ranks are allowed to bring in baseless policies that penalise people for no gain. Remember, these are the same people who have been PROVEN to have previously developed road safety policies including speed camera programs when they did not even collate or publish the data they said they were using to justify the programs (refer my previous thread http://www.fordforums.com.au/showthread.php?t=7330 and the staysafe website reports).

I hope our old mate John Cadogan gets onto this because it's time we shamed these incompetent lowlifes masquerading as Road Safety experts.

regards,
AP>