this letter annoyed me

[walkie]

This letter annoyed me. It annoyed me so much that I'm going to write one in. I don't have time to elaborate now but does it annoy anyone else? It was published in today's (30/12/2004) Illawarra Mercury.

[Babalouie]

Haha...that guy kinda contradicts himself...first he says that young ppl are dangerous cos they have no experience, then he suggests raising the licensing age...so that when someone at age 21 gets behind the wheel, they have no more driving experience than a 16yr old anyway

Then you raise the insurance premium for young ppl (even more!) so that they can't afford to run a car until they're older, and have a job...so catch 22, they still will have stuff-all real-world driving experience when they hit the road.

Good one.

[Stix Zadinia]

"what about raising insurance premiums" - wtf? so they're the cost of the car??

"increase the age at which a drivers licence is issued" - so we'll have a 10x increase in the number of unlicenced drivers. how is a young tradie going to get to work early in the morning?

[GTSBoy]

It annoys me a bit....but let's face it....many of the points he makes are actually quite true. The use of the example of the P-plater deaths always being on the front pages of newspapers is of course a misleading furphy, but the rest of it doesn't veer too much from the way that it is.

cheers

[Nelso]

What a fucking moron.
End of story.

[Captiva Fan]

True, the rest of it may be pretty accurate; although why it singles out P-platers as any different to the rest of the useless chooks on the road I don't know. Oh yes I do; it's because of the misleading furphy ...

[Beavis]

Somebody tell me, please, what the fuck a "high-powered" vehicle is?

Is that like when somebody shoots somebody else with a .22cal rifle it was a "high-powered assault weapon"?

[Nelso]

Nope, a .22 would jsut be your normal accident, but if someone copped a .50 that would be a street racing incident.

[Captiva Fan]

It's like the game of Adjective Bingo that I was playing with family last Monday, when the TV was on ....

[Stix Zadinia]

i think you're confused. an air rifle would be a street racing incident, a .22 would be two cars dragging off the lights, a .50cal would be a massive orginised street drag meet.

[platinum]

hah - all it will do is shift the 'age-range' of crashes up by a few years. People have to learn, if you teach an apprentice at age 17 or have one at age 21 on the worksite, it pretty much takes the same ammount of time and the same mistakes to do, no advantage!

[Tripper]

walkie your best replying with facts cause the people that write the letters have NFI its either the facts or shitting on there door step pissing in the letter box and shellys expander foam up the exhuast to get your point across to the person who sent the letter.

Yes im speaking about the same paper

[MR2Vaeth]

The headlines for the last 10 years contain many stories about P-plate accidents/deaths because such headlines are newsworthy. It does not mean that there are necessary more P-plate accidents, just that there are more P-plate accidents that make the headlines. The author of the above letter is a victim of selective censorship.

[BigMuz]

Agreed MR2- the sensationalism of these headlines is what sells papers-

In the SMHerald last week- Do you think there are more murders or suicides in a year in Australia?




Answer- Suicides by "far".

http://smh.com.au/news/Ross-Gittins/...182295280.html

The figures we dug out from the RTA say that of the 3.5% of drivers 17 to 25 iirc, they are represented in 3.5% of serious crashes.

Muz

[dazza]

Insurance companies are a business its not something you can manipulate just because you don't like young people driving cars....

Hell you'd think insurance companies being out to make billion dollar profits and all (if there's no major terrorist attacks in a year) that the premium's are already too high and already out of many people's reach