Urban Hacks

Most state road authorities in Australia at least imply that driving without doors is illegal, as the absence of doors would make your car unroadworthy and unsafe.

While some of the laws around roadworthiness are a bit ambiguous, the general consensus is that, yes, driving a car without two headlights is in fact illegal on safety grounds.

As a new parent, buying a child seat seems baffling, startlingly expensive and highly theoretical, like buying a helmet when you don't even have a motorcycle.

The answer is both yes and no, depending on what state or territory you're in. When we look at the legality of alcohol in cars we all too often concentrate our attention on the driver. However, in some states of Australia it is illegal for passengers to consume alcohol in a car - even when the car is parked by the

If you saw police pulling people over for a MDT, would you be worried, or baffled, or both?

Yes and no, depending on which state or territory you're in - and in some cases, which council area you're in. In some states of Australia it is illegal to sit in your car and drink alcohol, and people have been charged with drink driving while sleeping off a big night out in their car.Western Australia and Queensland are super-strict on drinking alcohol even in a car that is turned off and parked to the side of the road, or in a car park. In Western Australia it is actually illegal to drink alcohol in a street, including in a car, under the Liquor Control Act (1988). This came about to kerb a problem the Western Australian politicians and police found with what is known as 'street drinking', or drinking in public areas.Queensland is one state that has seen controversial laws passed to make it possible to be charged with drink driving, even if you aren't in the car. There have been cases before the Queensland courts where people have been convicted of drink driving as they have slept in the back seat.The issue is these people had the car keys on their person or easily to hand in the car, which fulfils the state's requirement for being 'in charge' of the vehicle, and then open to being charged with drink driving even though they had no intention of commanding the vehicle in that state.Legal experts from Queensland recommend handing the keys away to someone else and not entering the vehicle, even if you are only waiting for someone to pick you up, to avoid any issues with being found to be "in charge" of your vehicle.Confusingly, the issue of drinking alcohol in a parked car can be split between road laws and local council laws. This comes depending on the council zoning as there are many places in Australia listed as alcohol-free zones, where it is illegal to consume alcohol in any form.So, while it is not strictly illegal to drink in a parked car in NSW, Victoria, South Australia or other Aussie states, you need to double-check that you're not in an alcohol-free zone.You can read more about Western Australia's regulations here. For more information on Queensland's drinking laws and how the Liquor Control Act works, visit this link.This article is not intended as legal advice. You should check with your local road authority to verify the information written here is suitable to your situation before driving in this manner.

No, it's not illegal to drive with gloves on - presumably because this shouldn't affect your ability to drive safely and responsibly.In fact, a whole genre of gloves dedicated to being worn whilst driving exist purely to make driving easier.It is probably around this point that everyone born after the '70s will wonder what the heck is going on, as driving gloves haven't really been seen commonly since the era of disco and bell-bottom pants.But having a proper and secure grip on the steering wheel is vitally important to controlling a vehicle at speed in a secure way. And back in the day most cars had heavy steering and very thin steering wheels made of hard surfaces like timber or slippery clear plastic, and they are quite tricky to hang onto when turning or cornering at speed.Watch videos of the Bathurst 500 from the 1960s and you can see drivers using leather gloves to hang onto their cars as they raced around the (very rough) Mount Panorama course. But it wasn't just racing drivers who used gloves; they were often needed to give a secure grip on the steering wheel for ordinary cars while driving, too.It wasn't until the 1970s that power steering and suspension advances made cars easier to steer, and thicker steering wheels made from rubber or more well-textured materials became commonplace. This meant the need to wear gloves while driving dropped off dramatically.Of course, they are still commonly worn in very cold climates like northern Europe and North America. But we are talking about traditional gloves, not mittens or snow gear, which would be terrible (and highly dangerous) to try and drive in.Just for the record, it is not illegal to drive with gloves on in Australia. Make sure they're able to grip the wheel securely, otherwise the police could fine you for not being in full control of the vehicle, but you shouldn't have any problem with some nice leather driving gloves.This article is not intended as legal advice. You should check with your local road authority to verify the information written here is suitable to your situation before driving in this manner.

Truly, some of the behaviours that human beings exhibit are so self-defeating, so spectacularly lacking in logic, that if we observed them in other, supposedly lesser animal species, we’d find them as hilarious as lemmings throwing themselves off cliffs, or chimpanzees throwing their poop at one another.Ask any reasonable, adult homo sapiens whether it’s sane to drive a big, heavy, potentially deadly weapon of a vehicle down a busy road with one or both eyes closed, and they’d surely tell you that it is not.But ask them if, the last time they received a phone call they perceived as important while driving they pulled off the road to take that call, or read that text, or replied to it on the move, and their answers, in the main, will defy logic. Pulling over to take phone calls, or to write texts, seems like the behaviour of either wowsers or super humans these days, even though it was merely common courtesy back in the early days of brick-sized mobile phones.We know it’s the wrong thing to do - like cheating on our taxes or drinking tequila or voting for Pauline Hanson - yet we drive and use phones anyway. It’s like some giant Darwinian experiment, frankly, with recent spikes in the road toll in countries like the US widely blamed on the vague-sounding term “distracted driving”.One of the things we really like to kid ourselves about is the idea that talking on a phone hands-free, using modern Bluetooth in-car systems, is somehow vastly safer than using a phone shoved to our ear. The fact is that having a conversation of any kind while driving equates to doing two things at once, something many humans just aren’t very good at.A judge in the UK recently spoke out about the dangers of using hands-free mobile-phone systems after sentencing a woman who killed a motorcyclist coming in the opposite direction while having an 'in depth' conversation via Bluetooth.Samantha Ayres, 34, was still mid-conversation with a  friend - who gave evidence against her claim that she had hid a pothole and lost control, causing her to drive into 26-year-old David Kirk - and detectives concluded she had become distracted by her hands-free call.Judge John Pini QC said: "There has to be an immediate custodial sentence. The fact that using a phone (hands free) is lawful does not alter the fact it is an actual distraction. The guidelines make that clear.”A recent study by the University of Sussex in England also found that conversations of any kind can be distracting, even if they are hands-free, particularly when they require a driver to use mental imagery.“A popular misconception is that using a mobile phone while driving  is safe as long as the driver uses a hands-free phone,” Graham Hole, a psychology lecturer and an author of the study said. “Our research shows this is not the case.”The conclusion was that the human brain has a limited capacity for visual processing.The study found that when drivers are engaged in conversations that require them to summon visual images behind the wheel their distracted brains fail to recognise road hazards, and thus will react slower.Some very clever experiments were conducted, which involved groups of people in a driving simulator completing a driving course, one group with no distractions, then another group who were asked true or false questions that involved summoning mental images - "In a rowing boat, the rower sits with his back to the front of the boat,” was one example. A third group were asked simpler true or false question that involved no mental imagery, and in all three cases the researchers measured how fast the drivers hit the brake pedal when they recognised a hazard on the simulated road.A second, similar experiment was conducted which tracked the eye movements of participants under the three different conditions.The researchers found that the drivers who were not distracted reacted far faster and were quicker to spot hazards, while those who were asked questions involving mental images had much slower reaction times and were more likely to “look but fail to see” hazards.Those distracted drivers were also far more likely to focus entirely on the portion of road directly in front of them, reducing their use of peripheral vision.The conclusion was that the human brain has a limited capacity for visual processing.Professor Hole explained that when a driver is tasked with recognising road hazards while mentally picturing some aspect of a conversation that imagery “competes for processing resources”.“Conversations are more visual than we might expect, leading drivers to ignore parts of the outside world in favour of their inner visual world,” Hole said.This doesn’t, however, mean that drivers have to operate in silence and tell their passengers to remain quiet at all times.“Chatty passengers tend to pose less of a risk than phone conversations,” Hole added.Passengers in the car with you “will usually moderate the conversation when road hazards arise,” Hole said, while someone you’re talking to on the phone obviously has no idea what you’re faced with and yaps on regardless.“The only 'safe' phone in a car is one that's switched off,” Hole concluded, pretty much summing up the way we should treat Bluetooth technology. But probably won’t.Safer and far more legal, obviously. Interestingly, it turns out that that our ability to “self regulate” means that holding a phone while driving is even more dangerous than we’d previously imagined.A recent study at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, using its high-tech driving simulator, found that people who use Bluetooth to make a phone call tend to slow down and drive more cautiously. Terrifyingly, however, people who looked down at their phone screen while driving tended to speed up while doing so. Again, some human behaviour is just too stupid to be true.The study analysed 35 drivers aged 18 to 29 at QUT’s Centre for Accident Research and Road Safety-Queensland.Lead researcher Oscar Oviedo-Trespalacios points out that previous studies had not taken into account people’s ability to self regulate their behaviour and reported that the study had found such behaviour being demonstrated in the simulator by people using hands-free devices. Those behaviours included slowing down while on the phone and keeping very central in their lane.“But, overall, driving and using a phone still negatively affects both activities,” Oviedo-Trespalacios said. “It’s more efficient – and of course safer – to just pull over in an appropriate place to use your phone quickly and then resume your journey.“We found most drivers actually increased their speed while distracted by looking at and holding their phone.”The study also found that drivers who held their phones were more likely to use them on the open highway than on curvy country roads or in busy city environments.“Road-traffic conditions appear to play a vital role in self-regulation of secondary tasks and associated driving performance,” the researchers wrote in their paper.The scary fact is, of course, that it doesn’t seem to matter how often we’re presented with the facts, or how much research is done. Tomorrow, out on the road, you will no doubt see someone talking on their phone while driving, or appearing to talk to themselves while using Bluetooth.All we can do as individuals, of course, is to reduce our own risks by making the more intelligent choice, and parking the phone while driving.

Yes and no, as there are no specific laws around driving with a broken arm or wrist, but you could get pulled over if your driving is affected by your injury. Just because nobody has written a law to explicitly ban driving with a busted arm or wrist, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t be pulled over by the police and fined for not being in full control of your vehicle. Additionally, if your doctor gives you advice not to drive while you have a broken limb, then you cannot legally get behind the wheel. In some instances the police have required a doctor to sign paperwork to clear you for driving, which they will want to sight.The laws of common sense apply when working out if it's safe for you to operate a car with a broken arm or wrist. Can you reach all the controls? Can you operate the gear shifter, indicators, windscreen wipers, windows, and even the door handles? It's also important to consider that it isn’t just your safety you’re putting at risk by driving when you shouldn’t really be behind the wheel – how would you feel if a loved one was injured (or worse) in a crash with a driver who didn’t have proper control of their car thanks to a broken bone?When it comes to insurance coverage, most companies will only investigate if the broken bone was a leading cause of the crash (and claim), however we recommend you read the Product Disclosure Statement (PDS) for your specific insurance policy (from your insurer) to ensure that there is not an exclusion for medical conditions. While we found this link to the NSW rules helpful, most other states and territories don’t have well laid-out information available. Victoria tells you to check with a doctor before driving, while this legal blog backs up the belief that your ability to drive has to be okayed by a doctor rather than a policeman or your local transport department.​This article is not intended as legal advice. You should check with your local road authority to verify the information written here is suitable to your situation before driving in this manner.

There can be times when it is beneficial to use both feet on one pedal, like the panic-braking trying to avoid a crash. In a similar vein, drivers of manual cars will use both feet when balancing the