There are all sorts of ways that you could go about improving the general quality of drivers on Australian roads. Is public shaming really a good way to go about it?
Website Roadshamer.com collects the dashcam videos of drivers worldwide with, as per its own about page, the aim of “improving road safety by putting the power back in the hands of you, the driver!”
The idea is that you snap a photo or use a dashcam video to highlight illegal activities, thereby (in theory) “shaming” those who break the rules of the road into better behaviour. Users are encouraged to upload videos and share them as widely as possible across social media, with individual pics or videos tagged by country of origin.
I’ll happily admit that I drive around with a dashcam in my car most of the time, but that’s largely so that if an accident did happen, I’d have some details around it that could be used for insurance or police purposes.
There’s something about this that feels rather more revenge motivated rather than educational. After all, the target of a video might be widely mocked but unaware of it, which doesn’t seem particularly useful.
Maybe you differ. What’s your viewpoint? Is this useful education, or just public mockery at work?
Comments
11 responses to “Will Public Humiliation Improve The Quality Of Australian Drivers?”
I think we’ll find that some will take the opportunity to drive in a manner that gets them even more attention, if this becomes a popular recourse for driver discontent.
Based this reasoning on a traffic experiment the police did, where a large electronic display on the side of the road would show how fast you were going, in an attempt to promote speed awareness.
What they found was that whilst most law abiding drivers would reduce their speed, others took it as a prompt for ‘high scoring’, seeing who could get the fastest speed recorded on the display.
In the end, the police discontinued the social experiment, because it was making the road more dangerous to be on, thanks to these morons.
Public shaming by website, not so effective.
Public shaming by flogging. Potentially more effective.
If they did that in Adelaide, the number of submissions would crash the site like a ddos attack. Worst. Drivers. In. Australia. And I love that town. 🙁
yeah, we have some absolute fuckwits here in Adelaide. i put a lot of it down to selfishness and ‘i need to be first’.
if people had a mind to understand that if you let each other move forward with merges and that sort of things, everyone gets places quicker and happier.
OMG this! My two favourites are,
1: I need to change lanes, I have a safe distance to do so in front of the car in the next lane. I indicate to change, so they speed up to shut me out instead because fuck you, that’s why.
And 2: How people go apeshit if you don’t queue in a single line when you come up to a merge point. Oh no, we can’t merge like a zip, not for ‘queue jumpers’. lol!
Whenever I find myself driving when interstate, anyone in the car with me can tell I’m from SA because I’m driving normally for Adelaide which is aggressive anywhere else. :p
ZIP MERGE!!!! THANK YOU!!
i swear transport SA needs to do an Add Campaign on this move.
the amount of times coming back from Mt Barker to Adelaide on the easter weekend and one lane of traffic is banked up for literally 4 or 5 kms because they shut one lane for the Oak bank people to enter the freeway. multiple times, ill drive down the left hand free lane up to the merge point and then have to wait for 20 cars until someone is a) considerate enough or b) too slow off the mark, that i can get in the right lane.
and yes the amount of times, i have had right of way on a lane merge because i’ve been ahead, and then they speed up in the right lane to shut me out. FAAARRRRKKK!
I have to say, I just did a 3400k road trip from Adelaide to Jindabyne, Canberra, Sydney and back, and by far the worst drivers were in Jindy and Sydney. Between being tailgated /constantly/ to being beeped for not riding the clutch and squealing off the mark when the lights go green, eurgh. Never again.
Wait a minute, snap a photo? With my phone right? Something that would involve breaking the law right?
It’s one thing to upload dash cam footage, it’s another to pull out your phone and snap a picture.
You could do it parked or as a pedestrian. I know walking around there a few drivers I wish I had my phone ready to capture! “Oh no please chat to the person next to you instead of looking where you are going and almost hit someone”
Would be good if the police or government department took submitted dash cams and then sent out an infringement notice, even the threat of having to appear in court would cause a big rethink by most drivers.
That implies they where thinking when they did it.
Part of the fine could go to the reporter…
Dob in a Dickhead, make some beer money. 🙂