Car headlights and police -- [ Ordinary Nothing ]

Car headlights and police

As of today it’s mandatory to turn on car headlights during the daytime. The days didn’t become any more cloudy, and visibility isn’t actually reduced, but then again it’s been a long time since I expected these sort of laws to make sense.

It was interesting, when driving to work this morning, to see how many people didn’t hear. A somewhat larger percentage of cars than I expected did not turn on their lights.

Not that enforcement is too serious just yet. I also saw two police cars on the way. One was MP, and their lights were on. The other was Traffic Police. Anyone wants to hazard a guess? That’s right, no headlights.

Which legally doesn’t stop them from stopping anyone else on this, naturally. But still amusing to notice.

Oh, well, it’s also been a long time since I expected our traffic cops to lead by example…

Fine, another traffic cops story to justify this derogatory claim.

An acquaintance of mine was driving along a straight out-of-city road at an extremely high speed. Much faster than allowed by law. Frankly, much faster than was safe. I usually file these things as Evolution in Action, but he survived the experience well enough to tell me about it later.

In any case, during this wild drive, a traffic police car gets behind him, turns on the flashing lights and sirens, and starts to blink with the headlights. Quite naturally he made the assumption that they wanted him to pull over to the side of the road and write him a ticket. So he switched lanes, slowed down, and started to mentally prepare for a hefty fine… Only to see the police car turn off the lights and siren, and speed along into the sunset (literally, I think, but it works either way ;-) ).

You see, they didn’t want him to stop and get a ticket for driving too fast. They wanted him to get out of the way since he was slowing them down.

Also not surprisingly, the guy did not see the error of his ways, and did not alter his usual driving speeds downwards. Why should he with that example?

Not of course that they’re all like that. I suppose most traffic cops take their jobs seriously, and pay attention to the rules. But you only ever hear about that ones that don’t, since those are the interesting case. Nobody would much care to hear about, or bother to notice themselves, a police car driving at normal speed, stopping at red lights, signaling before switching lanes, and so on.

But still…