Some traffic inspectors joined a police random-breath-testing-station a week ago and inspected 1000 cars and found that 12 per cent of them were “”defective”, and on this paltry evidence the busy-bodies and do-gooders want to reinstitute compulsory annual testing of all vehicles in the ACT.
Their attitude is that the whole class will stay in after school until all of the class gets all of their spelling right.
I will ignore the obvious self-serving motive of traffic inspectors who would like to command an army of white-coated mechanics to prod and pry and tick and cross.
The main question is whether annual testing is worth the cost. It may give some motorists a self-righteous glow that they have passed the test. (Perhaps they should have awarded credits, distinctions and high distinctions instead of mere passes and fails.) But the quality of drivers and to some extent roads cause far more death and injury on the road than car defects.
In fact, the Tuggeranong exercise reveals the random scheme is indeed marginally superior to the compulsory scheme. In Tuggeranong only 12 per cent of vehicles were defective; in the old compulsory-testing days, 15 per cent of 120,000 vehicles that went over the pits were defective. When you consider that Tuggeranong is more economically repressed and younger than the Canberra average the statistic is even more telling. The penniless tend to have shoddier cars and the young tend to have cars that have been deliberately unroadworthy with preposterous modifications. You are far more likely to come across old bombs and louts in lowered Holdens in Tuggeranong than a “”random” sample in the inner south. Perhaps that’s why the inspectors choose to do their “”random’ sample there.
Moreover, the 15 per cent who were caught under the old compulsory system knew they were fronting a test and had a chance to fix the defects first; yet still 15 per cent presented with defects.
Contrary to the busy-bodies’ view, the fear of a random test seems to be having an equal or better deterrent than the certainty of an annual test.
Rather than keeping the whole class in, that deterrent should be made more severe. Perhaps those caught should be forced to take their cars over the pits every three months for three years. Having demonstrated their incapacity to look after a car, it is quite silly to allow them back on the streets indefinitely after only one check.
Justice Stephen Breyer of the US Supreme Court was in Canberra this week and had a couple of pertinent words about regulation. He said you should always ask why you are regulating. And should never expect perfection.
Neither random nor compulsory schemes are perfect. More importantly, they are about equally imperfect. But the random scheme is far cheaper and more convenient for the great majority.
As to why are we regulating, we must answer that any regulatory scheme for cars should be aimed at reducing death, injury and damage in reasonable proportion to the costs of the scheme. That involves a string of causation about which there is not much research. How many accidents are caused by bad cars, rather than bad drivers or bad external conditions (bumble bees, falling trees etc)? Do inspections reduce the number of bad cars on the roads that would otherwise be in accidents? Even if they do, does the prevention of those accidents warrant the cost of inspections?
Most opinion in Australia suggests that defective cars play only a minor role in accidents, perhaps as low as 2 per cent. Assuming inspections prevented all of those accidents, the cost of inspections would still not be justified (insofar as 40 lives and 400 injuries can be quantified). In Victoria (where inspections take place only on change of ownership), the RACV concludes that annual inspections would cost $260 million and might lower accident costs by between $30 million and $90 million. It estimated that at most between 0.6 and 1.8 per cent of crashes would have been prevented by annual inspections. Essentially, it says that tyres and brakes are the main car-defect problems that cause accidents and these defects develop in a short space of time so inspections do not catch them.
It seems to me that running 85 per cent of Canberra’s 120,000 roadworthy cars over the pits is a complete waste of everyone’s time and money, except those self-interested people running the inspection scheme.
This has nothing to do with right v left or private v public sector; it is just a questioning of where does the community want to place its resources: putting $3.5 million ($30 by 120,000 cars) and 100,000 human hours (15 minutes driving each way and 20 minutes over the pits) into inspections of cars and not achieving any significant or proven safety on the roads seems silly.
The whole class should not have to stay in after school because a few Tuggeranong louts cannot behave themselves, especially as the whole-of-class detention does not seem to deter them.