No doubt police will be out in force this Easter, so it is important to alert other motorists of their presence by flashing your lights or waving an alert.
Must Check out this article about Radar Detectors Under $100. Note that radar detectors are only legal in WA in Australia.
The law says you can flash your high-beam headlights to warn other motorists of dangers in certain circumstances, so long as you don’t dazzle other road users. Some road rules indicate that you cannot flash your high beams at closer than 200m.
However, if you do it in the daytime, you can’t be accused of dazzling drivers with a few hundred watts of headlight when there’s a multi-billion-watt lightbulb in the sky, can you?
Riders can also warn other road users of incidents ahead – oil spill, gravel, crash, traffic jam, police presence, etc – by using hand gestures such as waving your hand downward to indicate they should slow down, the “whirlybird finger” gesture indicating police ahead (either at the scene of an accident or with radar etc), or a camera-clicking finger gesture to indicate a speed camera is ahead.
At night, motorists won’t see your hand gestures, so you could perhaps use your hazard lights instead of high beam to avoid dazzling oncoming traffic.
It’s nothing more than what radio stations do when they alert motorists to crashes, traffic jams or speed camera locations.
While some police may say this is preventing them from doing their duty, it could also be seen as assisting them in the execution of their duties – that is if their duty is to make our roads safer and slow down motorists at that particular “black spot” as determined by the positioning of a radar unit.
However, if police duties are to collect revenue, then, yes, we are preventing them from doing their tax-collecting “duty”.
One Melbourne man has gone a step further and created “Speed camera ahead” warning signs which can be printed out (CLICK HERE) and used to warn drivers.
If you decide to use them, be aware that you should not deface public property by pinning them up.
Wouldn’t it be a better and safer place if we all pitched in to help the police this Easter?