Travel Tips

The Dangers Of Careless Driving

Where you used to be able to use driving without due care and attention or a momentary lapse in concentration as something of an excuse for a driving offence, these themselves are now driving offences.

Organisations such as MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) have been campaigning for such changes in the law for some time. Several areas of the country have different levels of punishment for this offence depending on the outcome of the careless driving in question.

But what is so surprising is that people dont take driving without due care and attention so seriously. They sympathize with the offender and offer advice as to how they can get away from it all! On a legal forum, we came across a question put by a member who apparently was charged for spinning tires on a gravel road by virtue of going very fast. There was a petrol pump next to where he was fined and the officer mentioned in his report that the offender was driving without due care and attention, and that since the petrol pump was open and there were people in the area, he could have injured someone. Now, the question in the forum was whether proving if the petrol pump was closed will be beneficial to his case, and to our surprise, dozens of people gave advice as to how he could prove that something in the cops report was wrong! What citizenship!!

Each year negligent driving is the cause of tens of thousands of people either being killed or seriously injured and we dont really take much notice of it. Thousands of people lose their driving licence each year (at least temporarily) because of careless driving and quite often they simply get back behind the wheel the next day without a valid licence. A lot of the time, the people living in the surrounding areas usually know when someone is doing this and dont pull them up on it, this is why we have a lot of the road accidents we have in the country.

Though driving without due care and attention is a relatively lower ranking offense when compared to drunk driving or cell phone driving, it still is one of the biggest causes for accidents, and needs to be addressed with greater authority.

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