Focus on speed blurs a
fatal truth
From smh.com.au
By Miranda Devine
October 16, 2003
There's
a misguided reliance on deterrence by camera instead of making the
highways safer, writes Miranda Devine.
There have been so many fatal accidents
on the Pacific Highway near Neil Saines's home in Ballina in the past
year that he has taken to keeping a record on a piece of paper near
his phone. The sounds of ambulance and fire-engine sirens send a chill
up his spine, and he says they have become increasingly common in
the 13 years he has lived in the pretty town an hour from the Queensland
border.
These are his notes for one month: on
July 4 a 23-year-old man killed in a single-car crash; July 6, three
teenagers were killed in a head-on collision with a semi-trailer;
July 7, a 17-year-old girl was killed in a head-on; July 23, five
cars were incinerated after a head-on, killing two people and seriously
injuring six.
Ballina sits in the middle of one of
the most dangerous stretches of highway in NSW. The Pacific Highway,
the main route between Sydney and Brisbane, is a two-lane Third-World
goat track for much of this northern section, despite promises of
a 12-kilometre bypass around Ballina and seven years into a 10-year
$2.8 million federal-state upgrade.
This excuse for a highway runs on a meandering
route through the centre of Ballina, taking drivers from one end of
town to the other, and back again, in a big U-turn that requires you
to negotiate five roundabouts and a little two-lane wooden bridge.
The strain of ever-growing traffic volumes
became much worse last August when the road was opened to the extra-long
B-double trucks, which are deserting the federally-funded inland New
England Highway for the shorter coastal route. Saines, aged 66 and
vice-president of the Ballina Bypass Action Group (BBAG), says an
extra 2000 vehicles rumble through Ballina every day, mostly big trucks.
As a result, the town's roundabouts are
battered, their retaining walls smashed, their little gardens overrun
as truck drivers valiantly try to manoeuvre 25-metre-long, nine-axle
vehicles into right-hand turns. The power pole alongside one roundabout
has had "half the side scraped off".
Saines says the NSW Government has been
promising a bypass by 1998, then 2004, then 2006, then 2010. Now BBAG
has been told there is no set completion date because of what the
Roads and Traffic Authority says are "engineering and environmental
challenges" on the surrounding wetlands. With funding to expire
in 2006, the RTA is saying the project needs federal funding to be
completed, despite the fact it is a state highway.
Despite the reluctance to spend money
on roads to make them safe, there is no such foot-dragging from the
State Government when it comes to ripping revenue out of motorists
in the name of safety.
The NSW Roads Minister, Carl Scully,
dumped as transport minister after wasting a reported $385 million
on lemons such as the Millennium train and the near-empty Liverpool-Parramatta
bus transitway, has turned his sights to speed cameras as a cure-all.
NSW already has 110 fixed speed cameras, which rake in more than $40
million a year. Now Scully wants 20 per cent more, claiming research
by ARRB Transport Research proves conclusively they save lives.
But in an article in this month's Policy
magazine (www.cis.org.au), a British sociologist, Alan Buckingham,
says the opposite, citing research which shows speed cameras do nothing
to reduce accidents, and may cause them. His research predictably
caused howls of outrage yesterday, with the RTA describing it as "seriously
flawed" and saying road deaths had been reduced significantly
at 28 speed camera sites.
But Buckingham says governments in Britain
and NSW lump together accidents and label them "speed-related".
The RTA says 30 per cent of fatal accidents involve speed. Yet Buckingham
found they had included in the definition such causes as "trucks
jack-knifing", "fatigue" and alcohol". As he points
out, any accident can be labelled speed-related since "objects
cannot collide if they are not moving".
It is "excessive speed for the conditions"
which Buckingham says is dangerous. He says it is those drivers who
travel at well above or well below the limit who are dangerous. The
safest drivers are those who travel at the 85th percentile of the
traffic's prevailing speed on any given road, which may be over the
speed limit. He concludes speed cameras therefore are catching the
safest drivers but not the most dangerous slowpokes.
In Canada, the Government of British
Columbia scrapped speed cameras when they found they had had "no
discernible impact on speed or the fatal accident rate".
The data for the efficacy of speed cameras
in NSW is not encouraging. Fatal crashes in NSW halved between 1980
and 1991, which is when speed cameras were introduced, writes Buckingham.
"Since then, the decline has faltered with a drop of just 3 per
cent since 1993, despite the implementation of double demerit points
in 1997 and fixed speed cameras in 1999." The double-demerit
scheme which operates over Christmas and other holiday periods is
shown by Buckingham to have had "no effect" on road fatalities.
Speed cameras may even cause accidents because journey times are increased,
causing drivers to become frustrated; drivers may divert to less safe
routes to avoid cameras; and cameras can distract driver attention,
and cause sudden braking.
The danger of increased reliance by government
on speed cameras, says Buckingham, is that "by regularly convicting
large numbers of law-abiding people [and] alienating those on whose
goodwill the police often rely ... respect for the law will lessen."
Speed cameras also let governments off
the hook on safety. They can blame motorists for driving too fast
instead of building proper dual carriageways that allow margin for
inevitable human error. People will always make mistakes but a moment's
inattention or miscalculation shouldn't be fatal.
Monday is the anniversary of the Grafton
bus crash, in which 20 people died in a head-on collision between
a coach and a semi-trailer on the Pacific Highway.
Fourteen years later, the road is still
killing people. Just last Sunday, retired couple Bernard and Maureen
Mellare died in a three-car head-on crash eight kilometres north of
Taree, on a section of the Pacific Highway that is being upgraded
and where the speed limit is just 80kmh.
Email: devinemiranda@hotmail.com
