A survey revealed this week that 64 per cent of people would like a return to the annual inspection of vehicles over a certain age. Even allowing for the smallness of the sample, it indicates a fair degree of support for the return to annual inspections. Before the last ACT election, the Labor Party indicated that it would look at the question. This week it said it would study the survey before commenting.
There is a danger here that the Government will take up the popular cause. It would be wrong to do so. It is easy for someone responding to a survey to contend quite honestly that a return to vehicle inspections would be a good thing because it would improve road safety. A great majority might hold that view. The trouble is that a quick survey of attitudes does not present the true complexity of a problem, and probably never can because people at the end of a phone line will not be bothered with a survey that presented a large amount of data for a considered opinion.
This is where political leadership plays a role. It is now up to government to explain why the reintroduction of car inspections would not be a good idea.
The main reason is cost effectiveness. Government and the community only have a finite amount of money. Money spent on one thing cannot be spent on another. If the Government set up inspections, the cost would have to come from other more effective road safety measures. Even on a totally user-pay system, motorists’ time and money spent on inspections would be diverted from elsewhere, perhaps including mechanical upkeep between inspections.
Only 26 per cent of people thought the present system was adequate, with 10 per cent undecided. The present system is one of random checks – either through carparks, at road blocks or when police come into contact with motorists through other duties. True, these checks do not cover brakes and suspension, but they are more than enough, given that any more would divert resources from more important road-safety tasks.
All the research shows that mechanical defects are not very large contributors to road trauma. Speed, fatigue and drink driving are far more significant, and it is here that the effort should be concentrated.
Since the ACT slowly reduced road inspections from an annual test for all to only some testing and later to no testing, road deaths have remained fairly constant.
Road trauma in Australia decreased markedly from 1970 to 1998, with the death rate dropping from 30.4 per 100,000 people to 9.4 and the death rate falling from 8.0 per 10,000 vehicles registered to 1.5. These drops occurred as jurisdictions across Australia reduced or cut-out compulsory vehicle inspections, and at a time when they concentrated on driver conduct – seat belts, red-light cameras, speed cameras, random breath-testing and so on. Moreover, the gradual abandonment of testing came as automotive technology improved, so that new cars coming on to the roads had better and longer-lasting brakes, suspension, steering and so on. This technology is likely to improve with radar assisted cruise control to warn against tailgating and in-board mapping and positioning technology to warn against speeding.
Even though road trauma has fallen, it is still a shocking thing that about 1800 people a year die on Australian roads, when so many crashes are preventable. But that prevention drive must be well-directed, and that means concentrating on driver attitude rather than getting side-tracked over bringing back vehicle inspections.
Australia has reasonably well on drink-driving and seat-belts. We now need to turn to speed, fatigue and obeying traffic signs.