A couple of very law-abiding acquaintances have expressed private outrage recently at being picked up for traffic offences.
I had little sympathy. I was in a horrible car crash as a child. Blood and guts all around. Bloke in the other car killed. Family members in hospital for weeks. Permanent after effects. Etc etc.
The I found myself absent-mindedly doing 50km/h in a school zone. I usually travel at 50 or 55 in the 60 zone, so I was doing my normal speed but had not recognised the school zone. There but for the grace of god etc. I, too, could have been done. Essentially law-abiding, road-safety conscious person with nary a speeding ticket in 30 years driving etc.
I am a rabid supporter of lower speed limits, random breath-testing, speed cameras and the whole box and dice. One ghastly crash and some time as a reporter covering crashes was enough. I wonder if I had been done it would have eroded my road-safety zealotry. It has made me wonder whether there is any more mileage to be had out of enforcement. We should retain what we have: compulsory seat-belts, radar and speed cameras, random breath-testing and so on. Combined with safer cars and roads, they have cause the road toll to drop from 3321 in 1981 to around 1760 in 1997. That is a good result. But is it enough? Why should anyone at all die on the roads?
I had the good fortune to study Kant at university (in the days before MBAs and BAs in Golf Course Studies were invented). Kant’s test for morally good action was to ask the question: “”What if everyone behaved like that?” Without being too arrogant about it, if everyone drove as I did, there would simple be no road collisions, at all, ever. A nick of a parked car would be the most dangerous event. A road death, caused by some mechanical malfunction would be a major news event.
It should be possible to have no road deaths at all. Since the horrible day in 1964, I have always thought that. But in endless Easter and Christmas editorials and other writing I have never expressed it. Those writings were always expressed in terms of “”steps to reduce the road toll”. So it was this Easter. It was a fairly standard-form Easter road toll editorial. Fill in the number dead. Wring hands etc. Later that week, the executive director of the Australian Automobile Association, Lauchlan McIntosh, sent in a paper he had presented earlier in the year. And there is was. A call for a zero road toll.
In an earlier life, McIntosh, was executive director of the Australian Mining Industry Council (now the Australian Minerals Council). He and others pushed for an industry policy to aim for zero deaths in the Australian mining industry. Many thought he was mad. Mining is an inherently dangerous occupation. You have to expect a few deaths. But if you go to any company-run Australian mine site, you will see an accident board citing how many days it was since the last accident causing injury and the last accident causing death. They are aiming for zero deaths.
We do not do that with the road toll. We should. We only aim for a reduced toll.
We think: Gosh, if only we could halve the toll we would be doing very well. Anything better than that would be impossible we think. But more radical aims are achievable.
What if I suggested that we could cut the toll to one-seventh of what it is now? That is from 1760 down to 250? Impossible! But that is not something from another planet. That is the difference between the Northern Territory’s and the ACT’s road toll. The ACT has one seventh the per-head road toll as the Northern Territory.
Every public holiday weekend, police in the ACT aim for zero deaths. Police in NSW and Victoria hope for it, but do not publicly aim for it. They should.
How? Well, maintain but do not extend enforcement. It is just alienating too many law-abiding people. Change the approach from zero tolerance of breaking driving rules to zero tolerance of death and injury. We gasp at rail, air, mining and other deaths. On the roads, we should say that death and injury is not an acceptable price for mobility.
The $8 billion a year lost in road crashes would be better spent on vehicle technology, licence re-testing and graded licences, pre-licence education safety.