The law in question is about slowing to 40km/h near emergency scenes and the incident occurred on the Western Freeway on Sunday, a day after the law came into place.

Let us be perfectly clear, slowing down at any emergency situation makes sense. Ensuring there is adequate room for services to conduct their work safely regardless of circumstance should be mandatory.

To this end, ensuring drivers slow when they see flashing lights and thus have time and flexibility to give these workers room makes a similar amount of sense. 

But even on the Western Highway where visibility is mostly good, complying with this law has proved complicated.

One driver on Sunday appears to have dutifully slowed when a police car stopped to help a breakdown. Unfortunately, not everyone was doing the same speed and the result was a truck colliding into the rear of this same slowing car. On the freeway the double lanes are open, nevertheless it still required a considerable stretch of road to slow suddenly from 110km/h to 40km/h.

Admittedly the law may seem onerous but that is not a good enough reason to not comply. And for all those who simply want to bandy the lazy “nanny-state” mantra, let them come up with better ideas and deterrents that can lead to a general behaviour change and safer driving and they might be worth listening to.  

No doubt on country roads and in short-visibility situations there will also be impediments that make it difficult to slow from even 80km/h to 40km/h in the available space. But for emergency services to secure the scene to give passing motorists this buffer zone, will not even greater resources and time be spent that might have been invested in the scene itself?

The problem as a law is one thing; education and adaptation of driver behaviour are another. A law that potentially increases dangers because it demands such rapid deceleration might need more adjustment to ensure varying circumstances are accounted for and driver reaction is sufficiently measured. The new law was meant to take the guess work out of what people should do when they see the flashing lights.

But this incident, like driving in fog, raises the spectre to the slowing driver of who may not comply.