The economic recovery appears to be coming with a price on the road. As more people can afford to take holidays and as business activity increases more people are travelling. It appears that that may be resulting in more people dying or getting injured on the roads. But exactly why road tolls go up and down may be more complex than that. Fifty-seven people were killed on the road over Christmas-New Year and the 1994 toll in NSW was up 71 on the previous year. The ACT’s toll was up 30 per cent. In general, the statistics have shown a fairly continuous fall in road deaths in most parts of Australia over the past 10 years until very recently when it has been going up again. The notable exception has been Victoria whose toll in 1994 was 376, a record low and down 60 on the previous year. Victoria’s road toll is now less than 40 per cent of its high 25 years ago.
Obviously, statistics from individual states comparing specific years can be misleading, but there has now been a consistent theme that Victoria has done better than other places in Australia. Can the rest of Australia learn from this? The answer to that question is probably yes, provided law-makers, law-enforcers and road-users come to the question with open minds. The first points to make are that there is no simple answer and that Victoria does not have a magic trick that other states do not. But the Victorian approach over the past 20 years has had three elements not consistently present elsewhere: a willingness to innovate; constant attention to the problem and a recognition that results are best obtained by attacking the problem in many different ways at the same time.
It is simply not enough to point to Victoria’s very graphic recent road-safety publicity, as was done by the Deputy Leader of the NSW Opposition, Kev Lingard. That quite short campaign had to be seen in the context of a long history of other measures. Victoria was the first place in Australia and often the world with things like compulsory seats belts and various forms of speed and breath testing. The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria has rightly warned against complacency.
It seems that complacency is the enemy in the fight against road accidents. Or more correctly, the enemy is static policy or static responses. Wheeling out the ritual holiday “”police blitz” loses its impact after a while. The nature of the problem is such that it requires some additional new element to keep people conscious of the issue and to prevent them from going to sleep at the wheel, as it were.
Better roads, better cars, smarter attacks on unroadworthy cars, more effective attacks on unroadworthy drivers, creating better drivers out of average ones and education are some of the methods that individually have on occasions had success. But it seems that the lesson from Victoria is that constant attention to all factors and a constant changing and renewing of approaches pays off consistently in the long term. As soon a you let up or apply the same approach as last year, the toll goes up _ to which the recent holiday period and 1994 in general are a sad testament.