Barton Highway Duplication push gets a website

caf said :

Felix the Cat said :

So how do tens thousands of motorists manage to drive along this dangerous road daily without crashing? DId the Barton Highway Community Action Group ever think that maybe it was lack of driving skill or not driving to conditions that may have been the major factor in these accidents?

Firstly – and quite frankly this shold go without saying – just because a road (or anything else) is demonstrably dangerous doesn’t mean that every person using it will come a cropper. Tens of thousands of people use heroin every day too without overdosing – perhaps the only problem with heroin is the skill of the user too?

Secondly, whilst it is bleeding obvious that the proximate cause of almost every accident is something other than the road itself, it is still completely possible that the road conditions are unforgiving of mistakes, and therefore are contributing to a higher accident, death and injury rate than would otherwise be the case. Unless you have some kind of magic solution for turning everyone into perfect drivers incapable of making mistakes (you don’t), it makes sense to design roads in ways that attempt to mitigate the consequences of such mistakes.

I agree with both of you.

Felix the Cat said :

So how do tens thousands of motorists manage to drive along this dangerous road daily without crashing? DId the Barton Highway Community Action Group ever think that maybe it was lack of driving skill or not driving to conditions that may have been the major factor in these accidents?

You quite right, how dare the question of improving a road gets asked. I mean driver training is the magic silver bullet which will solve all problems as 100% of every accident out there can be directly attributed to it. In fact how about we suggest that they stop putting down real roads in favour of dirt since driver training will carry the car over the road on a cloud of pure fairy dust…

(PS, not anti driver training, just ain’t people who get riled up whenever the suggestion of “lets make this road safer” gets brought up, since I have been a victim of your sort on this site in the past)

Felix the Cat said :

So how do tens thousands of motorists manage to drive along this dangerous road daily without crashing? DId the Barton Highway Community Action Group ever think that maybe it was lack of driving skill or not driving to conditions that may have been the major factor in these accidents?

So easy to blame everyone except the road isn’t it? How many head on crashes have taken place on the Tuggeranong Parkway in the last 10 years in comparison to Barton Highway? What about the road toll for the entire Hume Highway, all those hundreds of kilometers compared with a 50km stretch that annually appears to contribute to our national average? It has been proven that this road is a hazard, whether it is due to the drivers of the area or the conditions doesn’t matter. Something has to be done and people are trying to change it. If every 50km of road in N.S.W had the same number of accidents as the Barton Hwy, man we’d be in a mess.
I fully support the duplication, if only to be able to get past all those L-platers, caravans and slow moving farm vehicles.

Felix the Cat said :

So how do tens thousands of motorists manage to drive along this dangerous road daily without crashing? DId the Barton Highway Community Action Group ever think that maybe it was lack of driving skill or not driving to conditions that may have been the major factor in these accidents?

Firstly – and quite frankly this shold go without saying – just because a road (or anything else) is demonstrably dangerous doesn’t mean that every person using it will come a cropper. Tens of thousands of people use heroin every day too without overdosing – perhaps the only problem with heroin is the skill of the user too?

Secondly, whilst it is bleeding obvious that the proximate cause of almost every accident is something other than the road itself, it is still completely possible that the road conditions are unforgiving of mistakes, and therefore are contributing to a higher accident, death and injury rate than would otherwise be the case. Unless you have some kind of magic solution for turning everyone into perfect drivers incapable of making mistakes (you don’t), it makes sense to design roads in ways that attempt to mitigate the consequences of such mistakes.

So how do tens thousands of motorists manage to drive along this dangerous road daily without crashing? DId the Barton Highway Community Action Group ever think that maybe it was lack of driving skill or not driving to conditions that may have been the major factor in these accidents?

YES