Acerbic comment: lane discipline

The Australian national character is full of contradictions. We love freedom, but only if you haven’t freely floated here on a door, in which case we will detain you indefinitely behind ethically sourced barbed wire.

We treasure freedom of speech, as long as you don’t offend anyone when you’re exercising it, because we treasure being offended more than anything else.

We delight in our long tradition of mateship, as long as you’re not mates with anyone in an outlaw motorcycle club, in which case you can’t be mates with them. Because they are scary. Or something.

And we absolutely and positively love the fact our road rules explicitly state you are to keep left unless you are overtaking, but that rule clearly never applies to anyone who is actually doing the speed limit, and who wishes to sit in the right-hand lane of a freeway and do precisely 110km/h.

What is wrong with you people?

Move over. Do the speed limit in the left-hand lane. This is what civilised folks do. This allows speed fiends, lunatics and people on motorcycles to overtake you on the correct overtaking side.

Sure, I have no issue slamming past you on the left, or undertaking, as it’s known in the classics. To me, you’re just a mobile chicane. I’m past you and gone in seconds and I will never hear your mealy mouthed scolding about irresponsible hooligans speeding around on motorcycles. If you had been doing the speed limit in the left-hand lane I wouldn’t have had to do what I did. So it’s actually your fault and I hope you drive into a tree one day.

But things go a little into the shape of a pear when trucks are involved.

Personally, I have always held long-haul truckies to be the kindred spirits of motorcycle riders. I would delight in their meth-fuelled post-midnight antics back when riding from Sydney to Melbourne along the Hume Highway was a rite of passage into manhood, and not the boring freeway drone it is today.

What do I get these days?

I get Truck A overtaking Truck B. Truck B is doing 100km/h. Truck A is doing 102km/h. The overtaking Truck A thus takes maybe 15 minutes to get around Truck B.  Happy days for them both.

For me, it is another level of hell.

I am already made deranged by having to whirr up the Hume (or pick any two-lane freeway in this wretched country which is too stupid to build three- and four-lane freeways) because I have to be somewhere, and it’s still the quickest route for people chasing deadlines. Why would you make me any crazier by pulling this kind of creeping-to-pass bullshit?

In Europe, the motorway cops would shoot you in the face if you were to breach lane discipline.

In Australia, our truckies are too scared our cops will shoot them in the face if they’re found doing 120 in a 100 zone.
So they overtake at 102km/h – which allows them plausible denial that they were actually speeding, and more importantly stops them getting fines via the point-to-point speed cameras our owners have ever so helpfully installed everywhere.

So I guess I understand why you do it. But then I consider that at length, and then I don’t.

After all, what bastard difference does it make who is in front, since you’re both obliged to drive your semi-trailers at the speed limit?

Is it not just a matter of suck it up, fall into line behind the bloke in front and haul the bloody load? Why must you engage in this creeping bollocks?

And that when I encounter you driving side by side like a pair of 1000-tonne Clydesdales, the only place I can pass you is the breakdown lane, the median strip, or the table drain, and while they are singular pleasures, those manoeuvres really makes the Highway Patrol crazy?

You get that, right?

Is it not enough that we both, truckies and motorcycle riders, have to put up with lemurs driving cars at the speed limit in the right-hand lane? Surely, you feel (as do I), the world would be a brighter and better-mannered place if that lemur and his car where to be impaled on the front of your bull bar, so he could then do the bastard speed limit and not even have to touch the accelerator.

Of course you do.

That being the case, how about you come to terms with the fact that your magnificent pantechnicon simply cannot accelerate past another similar pantechnicon fast enough for overtaking to ever be a viable notion for you?

So don’t initiate the overtake. Sit there. In your place. Slipstream the other bloke. Save fuel. Save polar bears.

Do the right thing. For Australia.