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There are similar laws currently in Australia:

https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.a...

As a Skip who moved to Pommiland, mobile phones are not as much of a problem over here as they were back in Oz... Rarely am I stuck behind some stationary suckmuppet at a green turn arrow because they're too busy pissfarting around on their phone and wouldn't put it down until someone beeped at them. Back in Oz, that described every second light however I'd say the situation is definitely getting worse.

So I'd say this is about damn time. Here in the UK the Rozzers tend to enforce laws beyond speed. Do 10 over on a busy motorway and the plod couldn't care less, however tailgate, cut someone off or otherwise drive carelessly/dangerously and that'll illicit a response. DUI is an automatic suspension. Basically the cops are being pro-active here.

There are similar laws currently in Australia:

https://www.vicroads.vic.gov.a...

Good question, so I googled it. Of Australia's 8 States/Territories, 4 have such restrictions and 4 don't:

New South Wales

Information here: http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/licensing/downloads/p1p2_conditions_dl1.html

Victoria

Information here: http://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/Home/Licences/GetYourPs/RestrictionsOnPs/Pplatedriversandprobationaryprohibitedvehicles.htm

Some exceptions for certain classes of lower performance turbo/supercharged vehicles here: http://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/Home/Licences/GetYourPs/RestrictionsOnPs/Lowerperfomanceturbochargedorsuperchargedvehicles.htm

Queensland

Information here: http://www.tmr.qld.gov.au/Licensing/Getting-a-licence/Getting-a-car-driver-licence/P1-and-P2-restrictions/High-powered-performance-vehicles.aspx

South Australia

Information here: http://mylicence.sa.gov.au/p1_plater?fay=13&text=P-rules (you'll need to scroll down a bit and click the 'high powered vehicle restrictions' heading)

The remaining places (ACT, NT, Tasmania and Western Australia) do not have any vehicle power restrictions.

Note also that in most States, provisional drivers are also restricted as to the number and age of passengers they can carry. In many States they are also limited to a 100 km/h speed limit, even when driving on roads with higher posted limits.

Good question, so I googled it. Of Australia's 8 States/Territories, 4 have such restrictions and 4 don't:

New South Wales

Information here: http://www.rta.nsw.gov.au/licensing/downloads/p1p2_conditions_dl1.html

Victoria

Information here: http://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/Home/Licences/GetYourPs/RestrictionsOnPs/Pplatedriversandprobationaryprohibitedvehicles.htm

Some exceptions for certain classes of lower performance turbo/supercharged vehicles here: http://www.vicroads.vic.gov.au/Home/Licences/GetYourPs/RestrictionsOnPs/Lowerperfomanceturbochargedorsuperchargedvehicles.htm

Queensland

Information here: http://www.tmr.qld.gov.au/Licensing/Getting-a-licence/Getting-a-car-driver-licence/P1-and-P2-restrictions/High-powered-performance-vehicles.aspx

South Australia

Information here: http://mylicence.sa.gov.au/p1_plater?fay=13&text=P-rules (you'll need to scroll down a bit and click the 'high powered vehicle restrictions' heading)

The remaining places (ACT, NT, Tasmania and Western Australia) do not have any vehicle power restrictions.

Note also that in most States, provisional drivers are also restricted as to the number and age of passengers they can carry. In many States they are also limited to a 100 km/h speed limit, even when driving on roads with higher posted limits.

"In Australia you have to log something like 200 hours of driving before they'll issue you a probationary license. While that means you'll be more likely to have encountered tricky situations with an experienced driver sitting next to you, it doesn't actually reduce the number of dickheads on the road."

I think it's only 100 hours (in Qld at least; may be different elsewhere), and the 'experienced driver' needs only have held an open license for 12 months or more.

Which goes a long way to explaining the number of dickheads on the road. Far from having an 'experienced driver' beside them, chances are they had just another dickhead sitting next to them for most of those 100 hours...

I just checked and in Victoria it's 120 hours (not the 200 I said first), and 10 of those must be at night. With your Learners permit you have to be supervised by someone with a full license (eg not on probationary license) which means they've held a license for at least 3 years. Generally speaking, people are quite a bit more sensible at 21 than they are at 18, although some still have a way to go even at 21.

But that still does nothing to stop people being stupid on the road if they are so inclined, what it does (in theory) is reduce the number of situations a new driver would encounter that they haven't encountered before.

I certainly hold no illusions that there are any more or less dickheads on the road in Victoria vs Queensland :)

Yes - it means cash is not the sole incentive for avoiding doing stupid things on the road. Demerit points mean that everyone is treated equally regardless of how big their pay packet is.

The demerit points apply to the license for using public funded roads. Here is how it works in the state of Victoria: Demerit points : VicRoads

I am amazed (and pleased) that apple care about this. In most places I have worked this is either accepted or actively encouraged. When I worked for Vic Roads the CEO signed a big vehicle fleet outsourcing deal, then retired and jumped straight into a job with the new operator. The general feeling was "meh".

I don't know where you are getting your rules from. Here is the VicRoads page on roundabouts: Roundabouts

  I see nothing about u-turns at roundabouts in there. I also checked the Road Safety Road Rules 2009 [PDF warning] Statutory Rule, and on page 132 it actually shows a diagram of a vehicle doing a u-turn at a roundabout to illustrate a legal manouvre.

I don't understand why you think turning right into a driveway and reversing back out is illegal either. What if you were turning into your friend's house, then immediately realised you forgot to bring a cake and decided to leave straight away? How long would you have to wait until it wasn't counted as a u-turn?

The two-second rule applies in NSW and Victoria

Actually I just checked the Victorian and NSW Road Rules and no such 2-second rule exists.

If the traffic lights or traffic arrows (as the case may be) change to yellow or red while the driver is stopped and the driver has entered the intersection, the driver must leave the intersection as soon as the driver can do so safely.

You can find the Victorian Road Rules linked from here and the NSW ones here.

After reading a bit more it looks like this is actually defined in the Australian Road Rules, here (p49).

I worked for Vic Roads all the way through their experiment with OS/2. They back end was AIX and department level servers were OS/2 as were the workstations. The rumour going around was that IBM had spent a lot of money making a few senior managers in that organisation very happy to get that deal through. Around about the time I left staff were pushing for Windows98 to be deployed in place of OS/2. I came back to do some contracting and people were betting on how many hours it would run without crashing.

To get anything different in I think you have to have a lot of money behind it. I can see the same thing going on where I work but the product being pushed is clear case.

We had our own retro computing society at vic roads for the SCATS traffic system.

One day the flood detector at one of our remote sites tripped. Water got in through the secondary storm water system (telstra pipes containing 200 pair telephone cables) and settled on the slab under the false floor. I pulled up a tile to see 240VAC cables clipped to the concrete under 5cm of fresh rain water.

Its probably not very conductive in that state so I flipped the flood detector off and booted the 11/84's up again. Took care not to touch the water, though.

We only had the single platter removable disks. Nothing like the big washing machine ones.

It is a requirement here in Australia to hold a license for 12 months on a motorcycle with a lower engine capacity. This would be perfect, but it appears that the requirements only permit 260cc or below; there is no mention of a horsepower or top speed restriction. Has anybody heard of these rules being bent?

An anonymous reader writes "Vicroads does regular surveys of the roads in Victoria, Australia, to determine where they need to be patched or otherwise repaired. It used to be done in a vehicle travelling at 12 mph: slow, tedious, and hazardous to the traffic around it. Now, thanks to Linux, it's being done at speeds of 50 to 60 mph. The Melbourne Age has the details. Short version: the cost has fallen from $800,000 USD to $560,000. Not bad...

that searching their site for "linux" results in nothing.