Has anyone else noticed more impatience, risk-taking and aggression with overtaking lately? Drivers picking inopportune moments to overtake, inaccurately gauging the amount of space ahead, bombing past two at a time … that sort of stuff?
Maybe it’s more of a Golden Triangle thing – higher traffic volume, higher incidence rate – but I wouldn’t be surprised if the trend is mirrored around the country’s other major centres. I know it happens on the state highway network.
Once again, the Kaimais pokes its ugly head into the conversation. Yes, it’s top of mind for me as I drive the route regularly, but so do some 14,000 other vehicles each day, according to the NZTA. Many of those are heavy vehicles and many others seemingly impatient light-vehicle drivers. Anyway, I’ve decided recently to be ultra-judicious with my decisions to overtake on the Kaimais.
The eastern (Bay of Plenty) side is less problematic. Climbing this side of the hill isn’t much of a problem – the lanes are long, and sightlines mostly fair. Descending can be trickier – vehicles are normally moving quicker, and the passing opportunities are shorter and less frequent.
The western (Waikato) side is the real issue. It’s tighter, windier, slower, and the traffic is denser. Climbing is made easier due to dual lanes all the way up – but drivers still show no hesitation in ‘racing’ around those bends at 80km/h or more. And that’s a problem when there’s every opportunity you could round a bend to come up against a truck pulling a slow overtake on another – something which, in my opinion, should not happen … but it does.
Descending this end, however, is by far the worst. The passing lanes are short, many drivers who don’t use the route often clearly don’t know how short they are, and drivers will often take a chance and push their way through. I’ve noticed trucks straddle the lanes to prevent cars from passing, and I can completely understand why – no doubt they’d have seen a few near misses.
After witnessing some scary overtaking on this part of the road a few weeks ago, I decided to limit my overtaking unless: it was clear I could safely pass, there was little risk the person behind me wouldn’t be able to do so as well if they tacked on to my rear bumper, and I was clearly able to see oncoming traffic.
I also decided to do a little exercise to illustrate how long and – more importantly – how much space it takes to pass a truck. I don’t think some motorists clearly understand this. To be honest, there have been occasions where I was caught out, too. So, grab your exercise books and sharpen your pencils.
Take a 23m truck doing a constant 90km/h and a car passing at a constant 100km/h (for the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume the car isn’t accelerating). With some basic maths, the relative speed here is 2.78m/s, meaning it takes 8.27 seconds for the car to pass over 229.8m.
That same calculation for a 19m truck means it takes 6.83 seconds and 189.8m to effect the same manoeuvre.
To be honest, those times are a bit quicker than I expected. But what strikes me is the distance – remember, this is purely to cover the length of the truck – it ignores the time and space covered from the moment the driver decides to pull out and pass to when they’re safely back in the lane ahead of the truck. Add that in and then consider how often drivers decide to take a last-minute lunge at the 200m sign of the passing lane.
To satisfy my curiosity specific to descending the western Kaimais, I also worked out a 23m truck doing 40km/h being passed by a car doing 70km/h. In this instance, the relative speed is greater at 8.33m/s, meaning it takes 2.76 seconds and 53.7m to pass. Considering the four passing lanes on this side vary from roughly 150m to 300m, that doesn’t leave much space or time for many vehicles to effect a safe manoeuvre.
What’s become clear to me since passing on passing is that the time gained is – in most cases – at most only a couple of minutes. It is, however, so easily lost when encountering other traffic and roadworks. And that makes you think, especially when a misjudged few seconds and couple of hundred meters can make for a very bad day.
Take care out there,
Gavin Myers
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