Overtaking, Just how hard it is to do it Safely and Legally!

[tweeked]

Ok, so I had a long drive last weekend and overtook a car at one stage, and found myself SPEEDING ! I was thinking about this devil “speeding” and I did some figures in my head to try to work out exactly what is dangerous. Bear with me, this all comes together at the end.

Is overtaking necessary? Or should we just be patient and never overtake? If we did this you would naturally end up with long lines of cars running nose to tail behind a 97kph guy, a roo out in front of the first car and you could have a pileup, where a single car can take more evasive action. Add the frustration that human nature and impatience brings and I believe that keeping traffic spread out leads to safer overall travel. So scratch the idea that we ban overtaking, but how do we overtake safely?

Is the wrong side of the road safer than the correct side? We can safely say not!

So for safe country motoring, we need to overtake, not speed, but get back on to the correct side of the road as quickly as possible. Our beloved authorities generally give us a “safe” distance between vehicles as 2 seconds at the speed you are travelling, so we need to maintain this gap. So I now present two scenarios, both of which come about as we approach a car travelling at 97kph in a 100 zone!!

With our vehicle travelling at 100kph, we need to be 55 metres behind the car in front to be two seconds behind and safe. The road is clear (as far as we can see), so we commence to overtake by moving to the other side of the road, careful not to exceed 100kph. We need to pass the car in front and clear him by 55 metres to maintain safe distance, before returning to our side of the road, a total distance of 115 metres including the car. The differential in speed is 3kph, so it takes about 2 minutes and 18 seconds to cover the distance. In that time we have covered 3.8 kilometres on the worng side of the road. If there was a car coming from the other direction, we would need to be able to see them well over 7.5 kilometres distant when there approaching speed is added. I hope this was on the Nullabor!
OR
You break the law like I did. By speeding up to 120 kph before starting the overtake the differential is 23kph. The 115 metres can be covered in 18 seconds, taking 600 metres to complete the overtake, requiring 1100 metres available to oncoming traffic travelling at 100kph towards us.

It is laughable that one is considered safe and legal but in reality is seriously dangerous, and one is a high level speeding offence, although is much safer . There should be a 120kph limit for while overtaking.

Look, it was a long drive OK!