We have a Road Safety Strategy and Action Plan

While I agree with your sentiments, I do see some kind of irony in everyone here bitching about speed limits seeming to be the same people that bitch that everyone in Canberra is a crap driver and needs more training. If everyone else is crap, do you really want them going any faster 🙂

On this topic, my favourite is that ad with the 5km/h difference up here. Most of the difference was made up by both drivers having an abnormally slow reaction time, not the actual speed. Also, recent tests I’ve seen have shown that a bad set of tyres makes more difference than a lousy 5k any day.

And, does Hargreaves even have a licence?

Just confirms the fact that Hargreaves is an alcoholic knobhead.

He isn’t fair dinkum until he tackles ability or lack thereof through retesting every 5 years and risk rated third party premiums. It shouldn’t be left to the coppers to try to figure out what went wrong. After all, every car crash is at least one person’s stuff up.

They also spend a lot of money on the neglected E for Engineering.

Gotta love proper cambers!

JD114: Citing a single weekend of road accident statistics as if it proves something about long-term strategies is as meaningless as saying that one hot weekend proves global warming. The reality is that Victoria’s long term road accident statistics are significantly better than the national average; one reason for this appears to be that the TAC (as the monopoly insurer) has both a financial incentive and a mandate to improve road safety.

Over zealous promotion and enforcement of speeding is the easy way out. For those who don’t know any better it looks good; compliance is easy and results in nice revenue; and it is easy for motorists to tell whether or not they’re ‘safe’.

The reality is that operating a motor vehicle is a complex task that requires high levels of training and judgment. I support measures that enforce the concept of a driver taking responsibility for their decisions in a real sense. Bubling along under the speed limit is often unsafe, but many who do are under the mistaken belief that they are safe, simply because they are driving at less than the speed limit.

For years the best brains in road safety have preached the mantra of speed above all else while the majority of competent drivers have known that it is all bullshit. Inappropriately high speeds are dangerous, but to a lesser extent so are inappropriately low speeds. A bored and distracted driver tootling along a wide open highway at 80-100km/hr will look around, fidget, and sometimes even nod off. I know I have.

If the road safety people targeted bad behaviour such as following too closely, poor merging and lane behaviour, driving while tired and drug affected, and so on, they would win back the respect of the large number of disillusioned skilled drivers that they have lost.

As an example, can anyone think of any reason other than blind pig-headed stupidity by some half witted anonymous public servant for the imposition of an 80km/hr limit on Sutton Road from nearly to Wamboin? There are councils in the rest of Australia who would give their index fingers to have a road of that standard, and here we whack an 80km/hr limit on it! Same with the Monaro Highway near Williamsdale. And the worst thing about such poorly thought out decisions is that they affect a driver’s perception of what constitutes the need for a speed limit, and a driver, having gone through such totally inappropriate zones, will be more likely to carry on through a sensibly marked zone at 100km/hr and thus become an unwitting danger to himself and the public.

Finally, if speed was such a factor in accident rates, consider the following:

Victoria has draconian speed controls, no-one down there is willing to risk a bit of a speed when the conditions are safe. They’ve just had the worst Easter toll in Australia.

A table compiled by some road safety mob somewhere in the world several years ago and published in The Economist listed a pretty strong correlation between the road toll and top speed on highways, BUT… it was the opposite to what you might expect. in general the higher the top speed, the lower the crash rate. Germany with its open limits was near the safest, USA and New Zealand with 55mph and 90km/hr top speeds as standard in most areas came out as quite dangerous. Asutralia was in the middle.

So, you figure. Who’s more believable, statistics gathered by raod safety authorities or one-eyed narrow minded speed limit dogma preaching pollies and supposed road safety experts?

I think we need to concentrate more on educating young drivers and fining people for more than just speeding. How about a fine for all those people who sit in the right lane up the Monaro Hwy or Tuggeranong Parkway, when there is no-one else around, just because they need to exit in the next 15km. Or the people that do this while sitting on 70 in a 90 zone. These are all traffic offences, just like speeding.

I second what caf said. Variable-limit speed signs on major arterial roads like Adelaide Ave is a great plan (assuming they aren’t too expensive to implement).

Merging is a dying art.

I got beeped at by a P plater, for trying to merge. She was in the left lane, I was a little to the front of her, but she obviously decided that merging meant continue at will, but beep to get other cars out of the way!