The ACT Government is on the right track with its road-safety program for young drivers, but it is a moot point whether the details of the program are well-directed. At present, people getting a driver’s licence (usually young people) at first get a provisional licence for three years. They also have a near-zero alcohol limit and lose their licence after four (rather than the usual 12) demerit points, putting their licence in greater jeopardy. For the first year they have to wear a P plate. But from August, provisional drivers will have to wear their P plates for three years.
Under the road-safety program young drivers will get a chance to remove their P plates up to 30 months early and increase to eight the number of demerit points required before they lose their licence. After six months on the road they can, for $60, undertake a three-hour discussion group on road-safety attitude and risks.
The course is a sensible idea and so is its timing. At six months, according to Urban Services road safety manager, Robin Anderson, drivers are becoming over-confident, complacent and had learnt bad habits from other drivers. All this is true enough. It is also sensible to provide a reward for doing the course. The question is the nature of the reward, and its timing.
The increase in the demerit point buffer seems illogical. Surely, if the young drivers are new from a course, the community would expect them to be better drivers and therefore and the drivers themselves should have learnt enough not to require the extra buffer. The relinquishment of the P-plate up to 30 months early is in a different category. It carries with it a sense of graduation. It might have been better, however, to retain the year’s minimum P plate with the course open to anyone who has driven for six months or more.
The details, however, are less important than the change of approach by authorities. For two decades the approach has mainly been a police offensive using ever more sophisticated technology – seat-belts, random breath-testing, speed cameras and red-light cameras and now 50km/h zones. Little has been done to encourage better driver attitude and conduct – as distinct from discouraging bad conduct. There has been improvements in the safety of cars and better roads, but nearly all of this seems to be absorbed with drivers moving more quickly rather than it being used as a safety buffer. The campaign over the past two decades has been worthwhile. The road toll is less than half of what it was in 1975. However, the indications of the past couple of years are that the police-technology offensive has gone about as far as it can go. The toll is now static or increasing, after years of steady decline.
The offensive against the road toll has to be broadened. And that broadening must be directed at the group of drivers causing the most harm on the roads – those aged between 17 and 25, who comprise 15 per cent of the drivers but account for 30 per cent of serious road crashes. That the ACT Government is starting a program aimed at educating, encouraging and rewarding these drivers for positive conduct is welcome indeed.
As it happens the ACT is one of the safest jurisdictions on earth in which to drive – measured per head, per vehicle or per kilometre travelled. That is no cause for complacency, however. Indeed, it puts further onus on us to prove to the rest of Australia and the world, that roads can continue to get safer and that there is no point at which we can hang up our hat and say, we can go no further. That point is zero deaths. That is what we should aim for. A road death should be a rare, not a common, thing.