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.

What is surprising is that people dont really seem to take driving without due care and attention very seriously. In fact, people seem to side with the offenders and advise them on how to avoid their punishment. In an online forum we found one case where a man was charged for wheel-spinning his car on gravel by going very fast and kicking up lots of dust and gravel. The officer that charged him says in his report that there was a petrol pump nearby and it was open, and so could have caused a large accident and many potential injuries. The question he put on the forum was that if he could prove that the petrol pump was closed would that benefit his case in any way. And surprisingly, dozens of people replied with advice about how to get out of the charge and how to prove that something in the officers report was wrong!

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.

Although as an offence, driving without due care and attention is not deemed as important as drunk driving or driving while talking on the phone, it is still one of the leading causes of road accidents and needs to be addressed with greater seriousness.