Country roads might take you home, but they can kill you too

What a pointless report. Here’s an earlier version where they put in the corresponding statistics for NSW. Conclusions:

1. ACT roads are three times safer than NSW roads on a vehicle kilometre basis.
2. When ACT driver start driving on NSW roads their chance of death or injury jumps up to be the same as NSW drivers driving on NSW roads.
3. Nothing to see here move along.

About 18 months ago I took the kids for a trip to Wee Jasper, which featured about 25km of god quality dirt road.

On the way back we were overtaken by two SUV’s going very fast. Fifteen minutes later I came across the second SUV which had gone sideways off a bend into a tree. The first car had been driven by a bloke, and the second by his partner with the kids. He’d failed to notice that she’d crashed and had simply disappeared into the wild blue yonder. I’d call it a miraculous escape.

I comforted the woman and we got the kids out, some other people showed up and we were able to call for assistance.

I’ve done a lot of driving on those narrow country roads both sealed and unsealed, and I treat them with the greatest respect. If you push it too hard or lose concentration they will indeed kill you.

EvanJames said :

…variable roads where the nanny government hasn’t ironed out every possible issue with the road.

I think that’s a big part of the issue. Driving in Canberra, you hardly get experience driving at cruising speed, without having to slow down for yet another roundabout and/or inverted pot-hole, so when you get onto an open rural road, many drivers are way out of the depth of their driving experience and comfort zone. You see such people all the time on the Barton Highway – happily speeding up to 115+km/h when the road is wide and straight, and slowing to 70km/h as soon as a car comes the other way, or there is a slight bend in the road.

Perhaps the drivers aren’t used to unsealed roads and don’t think to slow down (same as some drivers don’t think to turn their lights on this morning while driving in the rain).

I imagine tiredness and boredom (even with stops) would have something to do with the accident rate to and from Sydney, and within Sydney, the complexity and intensity, compared to anything we have here.

Shock me, Canberra drivers are crashing going to Sydney or the coast. What’s new?

“…and on unsealed roads within 100 km of the ACT.”

Are they including the unsealed quality of the resurfaced roads inside the ACT? Nothing like driving through the middle of Canberra on a gravel road that has been ‘resurfaced’.

I guess some people find out the hard way that tailgating and indicating a lot (the two habits seem to march together for soem reason) do not a “good” driver make. Fast aggressive driving doesn’t work on variable roads where the nanny government hasn’t ironed out every possible issue with the road.