Year after year the government pushes the road safety message with the subtlety of a sledgehammer heavily focused on you guessed it speeding. All other road safety issues are virtually ignored unless they can be easily enforced. They constantly advertise on tv and radio with their propaganda. It's brain washing on a mass scale, fed to the populace to induce them into believing falsely that speeding is the bane of all evil.
Over the years there has been countless campaigns in this country about speeding. For those Australians reading this you'll have probably heard of most, if not all of these.
- Clip every trip
- Wipe off five(kmh)
- Don't Rush.
- Slow Down
- Towards Zero
- Ride to live
- Every K over is a killer.
- Speeding, no one thinks big of you.
- Everybody Hurts when you speed.
The latest campaign 'Towards Zero' video below, not specifically about speeding but road safety.
What's wrong with Zero fatalities you ask? Well nothing and everything. Firstly this Utopian idea of zero fatalities is utter bollocks, its never ever going to happen. I'd love for there to be no road deaths, really I would but I am also a realist and recognize that you cannot stop this from happening. As long as people are driving on the roads there is always going to be crashes and deaths. We are human and humans make mistakes. We fall asleep, we have medical episodes, we get distracted we make stupid mistakes, there is wildlife, people commit suicide, there are mechanical failures, mobile phones, fatigue and the list goes on. Let me repeat its never going to happen. But you can see where this is going can't you, reduced speed limits and more police to relieve us of our hard earned money as often as possible. It's already started happening on Australian roads - see link. The following roads have already had their speed limits dropped including Mt Glorious Rd, The Great Ocean Rd, The Putty Rd, Bells Line Of Road and The Great Northern Rd, the Old Pacific Hwy and the Bonang. If you cannot accept that there will be deaths on the road then you have no place being on our roads. I accept and acknowledge the risk.
The thing that gets me about this towards zero bullshit is that we as motorcyclists are the most vulnerable road users there are and there is no room in the government's vision for motorcyclists on our roads under this Towards Zero propaganda. They will want us off the roads and will introduce any measures they can think of to do it. That will come in the form of insurances and registrations that are so high that no one will be able to afford to ride and road tax collectors will crack down on motorcyclists for anything they can think of to get us off the road.
So what is the result of all these lowered speed limits and higher numbers of police on the road. You'd think that our lives would be totally safe by now but no, Australia ranks fairly poorly against several of our European counterparts. Here is a list of the fatalities per 100k people.
Road Traffic Accidents - Death Rate Per 100,000:
Sweden 2.36
United Kingdom 2.9
Norway 2.86
Switzerland 3.3
Netherlands 3.4
Denmark 3.5
Israel 3.4
Spain 3.65
Germany 3.9
Japan 4.7
France 5.1
AUSTRALIA 5.67
Canada 6.0
USA 10.6
Stats courtesy Wikipedia - Link
Most of the European countries listed above have speed limits of 130kmh whilst here in Australia our national limit is 110kmh or 100kmh in 98% of places. One notable exception in Australia is the Stuart Hwy in the Northern Territory which has been speed limited to 130kmh, which I might add was brought down from an unlimited speed limit. The Northern Territory Department of Transport records only 6 fatalities from 2004 to 2014 with 62 people badly injured. None of these deaths are directly attributed to speed however, with not wearing a seatbelt accounting for 63% and alcohol accounting for 31%. This data comes from times when there was no speed limits and when the limit was 130 kmh. Statewide the Northern Territory experienced its highest total road toll of 75 deaths on 2008 when speed limits were enforced. In the 30 years from 1981 to 2010 the Northern Territory had an average of 55 fatalities a year on the road. For most of this time there was no maximum speed limit. There were more deaths in the 6 years following the decrease in the speed limit than there were in the 6 years prior with unrestricted speed limits.
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| European Speed Limits |
We have sections of highway in this country that are built to very high standards and are quite easily the equal of Germany's autobahns. Roads like the Hume Highway, a double lane dual carriageway which stretches from Sydney to Melbourne through some 878kms of mainly remote countryside. There is no reason that the speed limit on this road couldn't be raised to 140km or even 150km to be conservative. I'm not saying make every remote country road with speed limits like this but certainly the well maintained and built ones yes. Why not that's what they have been designed for?
Fatigue is one of the major killers on Australian roads with some 20% of deaths caused by fatigue. A study from the Adelaide Centre for Sleep Research found that a person who has been awake for more than 17 hours is twice as likely to have a crash as somebody who is not fatigued. This is the same probability as a person who has a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05 g/100 ml. The same study showed that a person who had been awake 24 hours was equivalent to a person with a 0.1 g/100 ml blood alcohol concentration, with a crash risk of seven times higher than normal.
If we consider 3 popular Australian Interstate routes, Melbourne to Sydney, Sydney to Brisbane and Adelaide to Perth, taking 9 hours, 10 hours and 28 hours by increasing the limits there can be considerable time savings.
Route
|
Distance
km
|
Time at
100kmh
|
Time at 130kmh
|
Time at 150kmh
|
Time saved
At 130kmh
|
Time saved
At 150kmh
|
Syd to Melb
|
878
|
8.78hrs
|
6.75hrs
|
5.51hrs
|
2.02 hrs
|
3.27 hrs
|
Syd to Bris
|
921
|
9.21hrs
|
7.08hrs
|
6.08hrs
|
2.13hrs
|
3.13
|
Adel to Perth
|
2693
|
26.93
|
20.7
|
17.57
|
6.23hrs
|
9.36
|
With the potential to have more people completing their trips within the 17 hr window of fatigue there is actually lessened chances of an accident by driving at an increased speed.
This chart below shows the road toll in Australia over the last 40+ years.
What needs to Improve?
One thing that needs to change in this country is the licensing system. Our licensing system is so antiquated to the point that getting your licence here is a joke. There's an old saying that we use here that goes something like this "Where did you get your license? Out of a cornflakes packet" It would be laughable if it wasn't so true.
To get your license here all you need to do is sit a short test which doesn't even have to be in English, although all of our road signs are in english, go out on our roads accompanied by mum or dad who has a license and learn as many bad habits as you can for a few hours(120) then a short 15 minute drive with an RTA driving tester and voila you have a license.
Seriously how can you get a license if you can't read the road signs? That is a basic ability of being on the road. You need to be able to read the signs.
How's this for a comparison, a German driver’s license requires a minimum of 25 to 45 hours of professional driving instruction plus 12 hours of theory and eight hours of first aid training. Obligatory lessons include a minimum number of lessons each driving on: the motorway Autobahn; rural areas, and in the dark.
This should also be the minimum requirement in this country. We teach people how to pass a test rather than how to drive here and it needs to change. There are far too many clueless people on our roads. Who knows maybe the road toll might be a little lower if we had better trained drivers instead of licensed incompetents.
Even these measures of increased driver training, better cars and better roads are not going to stop fatalities on our roads. They may well reduce them but you cannot stop it completely and it is utter madness or plain wishful thinking to think otherwise. The government knows this and they actually have the power to stop all speeding vehicles. How? Compliance of every new vehicle to be fitted with GPS speed limiting devices therefore there would be no more speeding vehicles but they are not going to do this. Why? Because they know if that happened their revenue stream would instantly dry up and there would still be fatalities, making the whole road safety campaign of speed kills a complete fallacy. A 1.8 billion hole in the budget is pretty hard to fill. Makes me wonder what happens if they introduce driver less cars?
Our Victorian government would have us falsely believe that every 1 kmh over the limit is a killer. Well that's great, what about then that the NT speed limit is 130kmh with a lower road toll of their Victorian counter parts and the Victorians highly police their limits with a 2kmh over the limit speed camera tolerance has one of the highest road tolls in the country?
Now I am not totally against speed limits as I support urban area limits of 50, 60, 80 and then there are 40kmh for schools zones but there is a tendency in this country to change the limit every kilometre or 2 here from 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and back again making it impossible sometimes to know exactly what speed zone you are in, but completely perfect for mr plod to empty your wallet. These need to be consolidated back to a more simplified approach. We need to protect our kids from harm with the 40kmh limits but I do believe that out of urban areas in our rural areas with little traffic limits could be raised.
How about variable speed limits on our national highways so that in good conditions limits can be higher, but during night or rain & poor visibility the limits can be reduced. No, that all makes sense but it doesn't make for good revenue so therefore our useless bureaucrats would not even entertain such useful suggestions.
With never ending government advertisements on speeding being the evil of all evils the public has become brainwashed and no longer think that there are any other problems that cause road accidents whilst they blissfully stay under the speed limit, talking on their phones and not paying attention. Who are the real menaces on the road?
Even these measures of increased driver training, better cars and better roads are not going to stop fatalities on our roads. They may well reduce them but you cannot stop it completely and it is utter madness or plain wishful thinking to think otherwise. The government knows this and they actually have the power to stop all speeding vehicles. How? Compliance of every new vehicle to be fitted with GPS speed limiting devices therefore there would be no more speeding vehicles but they are not going to do this. Why? Because they know if that happened their revenue stream would instantly dry up and there would still be fatalities, making the whole road safety campaign of speed kills a complete fallacy. A 1.8 billion hole in the budget is pretty hard to fill. Makes me wonder what happens if they introduce driver less cars?
Our Victorian government would have us falsely believe that every 1 kmh over the limit is a killer. Well that's great, what about then that the NT speed limit is 130kmh with a lower road toll of their Victorian counter parts and the Victorians highly police their limits with a 2kmh over the limit speed camera tolerance has one of the highest road tolls in the country?
Now I am not totally against speed limits as I support urban area limits of 50, 60, 80 and then there are 40kmh for schools zones but there is a tendency in this country to change the limit every kilometre or 2 here from 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and back again making it impossible sometimes to know exactly what speed zone you are in, but completely perfect for mr plod to empty your wallet. These need to be consolidated back to a more simplified approach. We need to protect our kids from harm with the 40kmh limits but I do believe that out of urban areas in our rural areas with little traffic limits could be raised.
How about variable speed limits on our national highways so that in good conditions limits can be higher, but during night or rain & poor visibility the limits can be reduced. No, that all makes sense but it doesn't make for good revenue so therefore our useless bureaucrats would not even entertain such useful suggestions.
With never ending government advertisements on speeding being the evil of all evils the public has become brainwashed and no longer think that there are any other problems that cause road accidents whilst they blissfully stay under the speed limit, talking on their phones and not paying attention. Who are the real menaces on the road?
