What a calamity. What a terrible Christmas-New Year disaster. All that destruction and heartbreak. All that piecing of lives together. All those huge insurance claims for millions of dollars to be paid out. And it need not have happened. It was nearly all caused by human culpability and stupidity.
No, not the bushfires. I am talking about the road toll. Fifty-seven people were killed over Christmas New Year. You can reckon on $1 million a death in economic loss. If you add the cost of injury, it means the road toll cost more in economic terms than the bushfires and the road deaths happen every year. Perhaps because they happen every year we take less notice. Indeed, the bushfires have made us take even less notice of the road toll this year.
Last year 1750 people were killed on Australian roads. It is slightly fewer than last year, but calamitous nonetheless.
What can be done?
Something was done on the bushfire front after 47 people were killed in the Ash Wednesday fires in 1983. The annual fire toll since then has been about a tenth of the 1983 toll. Perhaps it was because after Ash Wednesday fire-fighting authorities said, never again. They aimed – and still aim – for a zero death toll.
A lot of tactics have worked in reducing the road toll since the horror tolls of the late 1960s – compulsory seat belts, random breath-testing, radar, speed and red light cameras, demerit points, 50km/h zones, improved roads, improved cars, improved medical attention and so on.
The real lesson in this is that the fight must be on many fronts, and perhaps more importantly we need to keep adding to and changing they way we fight the toll, until we approach a zero toll. In so many other facets of human life the aim is for zero accidental death – in hospitals, in mines, fighting fires, on building sites and so on. Why do we accept that we must have a thousand or two people die on Australian roads as some unavoidable cost, when we know that virtually every “”accident” is cause by some human culpable or negligent conduct?
It was therefore dispiriting this Christmas-New Year for NSW to continue with the old stand-by of double demerit points and “”all police leave cancelled”. It was more dispiriting to see that the ACT lamely followed suit.
The Australian Federal Police announced it as a success because no-one was killed in the ACT. Yet 22 have died in NSW using the same strategy. Victoria had its worse annual toll for a decade. The national toll over the past five years has not seen the dramatic falls experienced in mid-1980s. In 1981, bear in mind, 3321 people died, as against 1750 in 2001. But the 2001 toll was about the same as 1997 (1760). We are stuck. We are not improving.
History tells us we need to keep changing and adding to the armoury. I suspect we have come about as far as we can go with the police, fines and points approach. Indeed, we may have gone too far.
Evidence for this is fair anecdotal, but because I select the letters to the editor each day I get exposed to a fair range of opinion – bear in mind I have to read all the rejected ones as well. But there seemed to be a growing opinion that the speed and red-light cameras are just “”revenue raisers”. I don’t share this opinion. I think the cameras are important contributors to safety. But I think there is another phenomenon here that traffic authorities should consider. Bear in mind that writers of Letters to the Editor tend to be respectable, middle-class, law-abiding sort of people. It seems to me from scanning this opinion, that the rigidity of the application of traffic laws is aggravating a large section of law-abiding, safety-conscious people. You also hear this opinion generally at social gatherings.
The danger here is that people in their 40s and older who get pinged doing a tad over the limit (and who hasn’t) get no chance to plead mitigation or to escape with a grovel and an expression of the contrition they genuinely feel — as happened when all speeding cases were heard by magistrates. The upshot is that these people then join the anti-cop, anti-camera camp when they should be the very people we need to proselytise the need to slow down and obey the rules among younger drivers.
The cameras are fining people and taking a full three demerit points for quite trivial excesses of speed. It hasn’t happened to me, but for the grace of god. But it has happened to friends – and they are lost to the cause of teaching road safety to their 17 to 25-year-old children.
The strictness is becoming counter-productive.
The points system and the on-the-spot fines do not distinguish between first, second and third offences and go up in brackets of 15km/h. We need more warnings for first offences and the points system should be more graded. The aim of the points system is to get repeat offenders off the road. That is a laudable aim, but it can be done without getting so many generally safe drivers off-side.
Another opinion also came through in the letters to the editor this year – a screaming frustration by people witnessing ghastly, unsafe behaviour on the roads: tail-gating, lane hopping, violent acceleration, line-breaking, taking corners too quickly. These offences are easily witnessed but not easy to gather evidence that would satisfy a court. A radar reading or camera shot is virtually irrefutable. But evidence of estimates of distance or line-breaking is much harder to get. And it is even harder when tight budgets mean fewer cops are seen on the road.
This year’s toll is about the same as it has been for the past five years. Some change is needed because it should go down to near zero.
When you look at the map in yesterday’s paper pin-pointing the places where 16 people died last year on ACT roads, you have to wonder how anyone could die in places where there are no hazards and roads are generally excellent. It is not as if motorists are climbing Mount Everest.