Close Call

[Demons1964]

I travel on Lysterfield road on the way to work each morning. It's a single lane twisting country road on Melbourne's outskirts with a hill/embankment on the left and a guard rail on the right with a 60k limit while currently under roadwork. So once you're behind someone, unless you're game to overtake you're stuck behind them for the length of the road (2-3 km's) until you hit traffic lights at the north end. Occasionally I see impatient drivers overtake in stupid spots and yesterday I watched a brand new yellow Ford ute get impatient and overtake (was doing well over 120 in the process of overtaking).

Today I was behind a truck and it was obviously slow to accelerate, but being a country road once it was up to speed it travelled at the speed limit. It's a dangerous road that's had heaps of crashes and some fatalities on and not worth taking risks on. That same ute showed his impatience again from 4 cars behind me and tried to overtake everyone including the truck right as we were approaching a left-hand bend shielded by the hill. Sure enough other cars were coming the other way while this idiot was trying to overtake everyone . Remember there's no space to go left or right on this road. I could see a very bad head-on about to happen so I slammed on the brakes while he was coming alongside to save his proverbial, risking getting rear-ended by the car behind me. He ducked in front of me just behind the truck, missing the oncoming car by inches. It went by with the horn blaring, and once it had passed this moron did the same manoevre around the truck (still at the blind turn!) speeding off into the distance. The truck caught up to him at the traffic lights - he nearly killed himself and/or innocent others to save 15 seconds.

Sorry about the long post, but I thought I'd plead for others to take care on the roads. Impatience is how accidents happen, so please be careful and aware on the roads.

Mark.

[Snowfox]

Yeah the "bulletproof overtakers", must be thirteen to the dozen. I guess all we can do is think for them and try not to get killed in their wake.

[rattattack1313]

well said.....there is plenty of OLD drivers, and plenty of BOLD drivers, but not many OLD, BOLD drivers......

[goVZ]

You ain't gonna believe this, but in the last year or so that i've been driving, i have never overtaken a car. Don't exactly intend to do so anytime either, mainly because of how many stupid people there are on the road.

[UNSAFE]

impatiance or incompetents ? or both

[MoSkA]

I've overtaken one car in my 2 years of learning.
It was another learner and she was having a lot of problems shifting (I think) so I followed her at 3kmph (probably closer to 20, felt like 3.) on a winding stretch of road for about 1km until I got to the long straight. Overtook and was done with it.
I was overtaken by a Porche once on that same stretch of road. But he had a couple hundred meters... Probably doing about 140-150odd and pretty much zoomed right past me.
Probably didn't know the area is prone to cameras. Too bad there wasn't one there that day.