Opinion: West Aussies quick to use the COVID app but slow to take their foot off the gas for country roadworks

I’m not as young as I used to be, not the thrillseeker I was in my earlier days.

I wouldn’t describe myself as totally risk-averse but I pick and choose my moments these days.

Take the speed limit, for example.

I regard the limit as the limit, not something to be pushed and stretched.

I may have mentioned here before that I have a few speeding fines to my credit, mainly from the last century.

Mine is not a perfect record, and I am not the world’s best driver.

Now I’ll make the observation that the past 12 months have seen most of us complying with COVID-19 rules and regulations.

Most of that compliance has been described as being for everyone’s health and welfare. It has involved COVID apps, social distancing, crowd sizes etc.

It would seem the vast majority are willing to acknowledge and respect these restrictions. But somehow it must be different when it comes to the speed limit.

I contend that many of those who are so fantastically COVID-compliant are not speed limit-compliant.

What? Well, last week I was returning to our great city of the north when I encountered some roadworks south of Badgingarra.

It was 80km/h for quite a few kilometres.

Perhaps you’ve been through there too, so you know where I’m talking about. Without a word of a lie, I was the only one adhering to 80km/h in those roadworks zones.

Everyone else went past me like I was Grandpa with a flat tyre on a pushbike.

Were they speeding because no one was around to control the area?

If the police were there with speed cameras or patrol cars, they might have had a field day.

If there was a giant QR code on the side of the road where you had to register before you could proceed, perhaps the 80km/h limit might have worked.

And the good Lord knows there were plenty of 80km/h signs up to indicate that conditions had changed.

And have I forgotten to tell you that some of these people, who are apparently licensed to drive a car (large four-wheel-drives mainly) were so impatient to pass that the double white line meant nothing to them?

I bet none of them got the cane in school, either ...