State has failed on road
toll, says RAC
From The West Australian
By Jennifer Curtis
March 13, 2007
WA has many of
the country’s most dangerous roads, vehicles and drivers, and
the State Government’s four-year road safety strategy has failed,
the RAC claims.
RAC spokesman David Moir said big funding shortfalls for road improvements
and the ineffective targeting of high-risk drivers were partly to
blame for WA’s disproportionately high fatality rate.
“This must be a failure in the Government’s eye. Their
goal was to make WA the safest State in Australia, but four years
on we are near the bottom of the class,” Mr Moir said.
He said there was a clear need for “less talk and more action”.
“The strategy hasn’t been properly implemented —
it contains a lot of sound and proved ideas but a lot of those ideas
haven’t been put into place. Yet here we are, well into the
last year of the strategy,” he said.
Placing WA in fifth or sixth place as the most dangerous State to
drive a car, he argued the Government could not defend its poor performance,
which could have been avoided if the road-safety strategy had been
executed properly.
Mr Moir said the problem was due largely to a lack of commitment at
ministerial level and the fact that road safety was not given sufficient
priority by police and Main Roads, which had other obligations.
The RAC wants a $200 million funding boost to address unsafe roads,
especially given that many major highways have only a two-star safety
rating. It also disapproves of the lengthy delays in setting the criteria
for the $103 million Safer Roads program.
Driver safety had suffered from delays in targeting high-risk groups
such as novice drivers, the failure to implement a program to deter
speeding motorcyclists and lower levels of roadside breath tests.
“The Government strategy told us by the end of 2007 we would
be the safest in Australia but we’re showing no signs of getting
anywhere close to that,” Mr Moir said. “The Government
isn’t putting the appropriate resources and accountability into
the agencies responsible for putting road safety into practice —
that’s our biggest concern.
“The Government is in the process of developing a new strategy
but it should focus on how to make the new strategy work, otherwise
the public of WA will be shown a brand-new strategy with lots of new,
great ideas as we were four years ago but we won’t have any
real confidence it will work.”
Police Minister John Kobelke, who has just returned from a trip to
Europe to gather more ideas about road safety in preparation for the
next strategy, was not available for comment.
ADRA backs the RAC. We believe that there has been a lack of commitment,
funding and direction when it comes to road safety in Western Australia.
We call for an independent enquiry into Road Safety in Western Australia
which will result in a more accurate and effective result than the
previous four years.
