Do we need to know we are going 240km/h?

SOMETIME in the mid-1970s I wrote an article about taking my ancient Holden car to the Dickson Motor Registry for its annual registration check-up.

These were, bear in mind, the good old days, a decade and half before self-government.

It was before the Phillip Motor Registry had opened and the Dickson registry was strained the limit. It was nearly a three-hour wait. The ABC was broadcasting cricket. CDs and ipods had not been invented.

There was a massive queue down Challis Street and round the corner into Morphett Street. Drivers couldn’t leave their cars because they had to inch forward in the queue. Artful lads were going from car-to-car selling cool drinks at double the price in the hot summer sun. Most cars did not have air-conditioning.

In fact, it was the dumb old days. Every car had to be inspected every year for mechanical and other defects before its registration could be renewed. It was a huge waste of time and money. I doubt if one life was saved or a significant number of crashes prevented.

This week I had an eerily nostalgic re-visit to the Dickson Motor Registry. As I had bought a NSW registered car privately, I was required to get a vehicle-identification check to show the car had not been cobbled together from stolen parts and “re-birthed”.

How times have changed. I had rung the appropriate number and was given an appointment. Moreover, someone from the government rang me the day before to remind me of it.

I arrived at Dickson at the appointed time to find no queue. A mechanic in a white coat (I am sure only government mechanics wear white coats) pointed out the cashier who took the fee and showed me the waiting room.

I had hardly time to start the Sudoku, let alone finish it, and the car was given a clean bill.

Pertinently, before I had the identification test, I got a roadworthy test from a private garage where you could leave the car and do something useful, instead of being in a queue at the mercy of the government mechanic.

Since the mid-1970s – when the Australian road toll was 3500 a year, more than double the present rate — authorities have clearly applied their brains and evidence to road safety. Obviously, mechanical defects are not a major cause of crashes – certainly not enough to warrant the collective punishment of annual roadworthy tests when it is more effective to go around the carparks an slap notices on cars with obvious defects. If you neglect your tyres and cracked windows, you are likely to be neglectful of other things and so you should be compelled to get a roadworthy test.

Clearly, no seat belts, speed, alcohol and running red lights do cause a lot of crashes and attention has been given to them with great effect.

Now we have new evidence that talking on mobile phones, even hands-free ones, causes driver distraction equivalent to a 0.08 blood alcohol content. Perhaps it is worse because instead of an even alcoholic blur of ineptness, a phone user, especially a dialer or texter, would have intense patches of extreme distraction.

It is different from talking to a passenger because a passenger will understand the need for a driver to cut conversation immediately. A phone correspondent will have to be told. It is natural human politeness which could be deadly.

Ban them. Give police power to demand access the phone’s record to see if it was being used immediately before the driver was pulled up or crashed. Police have power to breath-test drivers now. This is no different.

When Victoria became one of the first jurisdictions in the world to mandate seat-belt wearing, people seriously argued that it was a breach of civil liberties, just as some argued bans on smoking in the workplace was a breach of civil liberties.

Once the evidence is in we should act on it. Even pulling over to answer the phone can cause danger. Perhaps it should be an offence to have a phone on unless a passenger is able to answer it.

Amid all this change – to rules, policing and road and car quality – one thing, alas, seems to remain constant: the fallibility of the person behind the wheel. The road toll has only gone down because of tougher policing, cameras, better cars and better roads. Many drivers will continue to behave as badly as they think they can get away with.

Speaking of evidence, I see the ACT Road Safety Trust is seeking applications for research funding. It gets $1 million a year from a levy on registration, and would probably save double that if it prevented a major crash or two each year.

So can someone please follow-up this one: what would it take to force car manufacturers to consistently put indicators on one side of the steering column and wipers on the other. It doesn’t matter which way around they go, provided all manufacturers do it the same way and we stop the present situation where the Japanese and Australians do it one way and the Europeans the other.

It results in people in hire cars, borrowed cars or their spouse’s car behaving like Mr Bean — going round corners with the wipers on or flashing madly in the rain.

I am sure it has caused unnecessary accidents. A dog-wagging tail like the ACT would be in an ideal position to advise federal authorities on how a small market like Australia could force world-wide change.

Tell the manufacturers to sort it by, say, 2012, or it will be decided by the toss of a coin and all new cars sold in Australia after, say, 2015, will have to have indicators on the left and wipers on the right, or vice versa depending on the toss.

And while we are at it, let’s force them to stop having speedometers than read up to absurdly high speeds like 240km/h. If the maximum reading on any speedo is, say, 140km/h, it will remove much of the incentive among hoons bragging about how fast they have gone.
CRISPIN HULL
This article was first published in The Canberra Times on 12 February 2011.