Ute dudes delinquent speedsters

What is interesting is who is doing the speeding.

I GUESS another aspect of rural living I have to get used to is people breaking the speed limit.

Except I don't plan to get used to it. I get to see plenty of bad driving in the course of my commute from Featherston to Masterton and back, and certainly some shocking examples when I pop over the Rimutaka Hill road to Wellington every so often.

When you're on the Featherston straights, or on some vanishing-point road with a name that ends with the word "line", it would be easy to get blase about someone wanting to overtake you when you're already on the speed limit.

It happens to me so frequently out of Featherston, while my cruise control is set at 100km/h, that I'm almost resigned to easing over to the left to give the speedster a clear view.

What is interesting is who is doing the speeding.

Since I live in Featherston, I'm not blind to the youngsters in modified "rice rockets", to use the American expression for lightweight Japanese cars with overpowered engines.

Every so often, there's one that roars up and down Fox St in an evening as part of some vague social ritual. But while locals might think they're a plague, there's actually not that many of them. Wellington and Hutt have bigger problems. Even my former well-to-do suburb of Churton Park had more serious boy racing. That shouldn't be surprising. It's a vastly bigger population over there and, while boy racers like their gatherings away from police scrutiny, petrol's expensive and it's an hour's drive to Featherston.

But what there are a lot of in Wairarapa is powerful farm-style utes. They are ones who tailgate me and power past me on the commute to Masterton. They are the ones who break the speed limit.

Now, these aren't necessarily farmers behind the wheel. This is the sort of community where people tend to buy a ute because they happen to live in a rural area. But, whatever, when it comes to speeding, you ute guys are the delinquents. And I'm getting to the point now where phoning star-555 and putting you on the police system might be a healthy thing for us all.