TOUCHÉ WOOD

Alan Wood's been reading the AGB....

Speed cameras out of focus with fact

PERHAPS because of generally good weather, Easter in Australia this year has seen a welcome fall in the number of road deaths. Sadly, it doesn't mean it won't go up again next year or the year after.

Road deaths and injuries can't and won't be permanently reduced to zero, and it is reasonable to ask whether the increasingly vigorous persecution of ordinary, law-abiding Australians in the name of road safety has gone too far.

As it happens, this is a good time to be asking the question. Whether you know it or not, last Wednesday was World Health Day and the theme for 2004 was "Road Safety is no Accident". So, last week in Paris (where else), the World Health Organisation and the World Bank released the World Report on Road Traffic Injury Prevention.

According to the report: "The world faces a global road safety crisis that has not yet been fully recognised and that will continue to grow unless appropriate action is taken." It estimates 1.2 million people are killed and as many as 50 million injured on the world's roads each year. It quotes projections that these figures will increase by about 65 per cent by 2020.

On closer inspection, it is not the world at all but particular areas of it that face rising road deaths and injuries. A World Bank working paper on which the report relies – Traffic Fatalities and Economic Growth by Kopits and Cropper – estimates fatalities will rise by 147 per cent in India and 92 per cent in China, more than 300,000 deaths a year in each country, by 2020.

However, in high-income countries such as Australia, fatalities are projected to fall by about 28 per cent. Looked at another way, deaths per 10,000 people will rise to approximately two per 10,000 in developing countries, but fall to less than one per 10,000 in high-income countries. It is presently 1.4 per 10,000 in Australia.

There is a quite clear relationship between road deaths and economic growth. Because of the growth in the number of motor vehicles that accompanies rising incomes, the number of road deaths initially increases. The peak is reached when per capita incomes rise to about $US8600 (measured in constant 1985 dollars). Interestingly, this is within the range of income at which other problems such as air and water pollution also peak. In other words, as countries get richer, they can spend more money and effort addressing these problems. Australia is well beyond this stage of development, and the issues now are how much further we can reasonably expect to go in reducing road death and injury, and how we should go about it.

I don't know what the answer is to the first question, but it certainly isn't to zero. As for the second, there are growing signs that the present approach, with its obsession with speed as the cause of road death and injury, is misplaced and excessive.

An article in the spring 2003 issue of Policy, the journal of the Centre for Independent Studies, by UK academic Alan Buckingham, questioning this focus on speed and speed cameras was immediately attacked by the road safety academics behind measures such as the cameras and ever-reducing speed limits.

Yet in an interview in January 2003, federal Transport Minister John Anderson expressed concern that safety experts might be focusing too much on speeding as the main cause of road accidents.

The state where this may already have gone too far is Victoria under the Bracks Government. For example, its use of secret speed cameras, all too often for revenue raising rather than road safety reasons, is creating a growing backlash from Victorian motorists. In October last year the Herald Sun published a letter from "Concerned [police] Sergeants", angry that cameras were being used on roads with artificially low speed limits, low speed tolerance levels and high revenue-raising potential.

The discovery of faulty speed cameras, initially covered up while motorists were fined, lost demerit points and put their driving licences at risk, the relentless persecution of a female motorist for allegedly travelling at a speed her car was mechanically incapable of and other incidents have undermined the credibility of the Government's Arrive Alive road safety program.

Ironically, Victoria gets a tick in the WHO/World Bank report for the activities of its Transport Accidents (sic) Commission and its heavy investment in improving road safety. TAC is one of the Victorian Government's speed zealots. It runs very tacky road trauma ads that have no provable impact on motorists' behaviour.

Last year motorists travelling to and from Melbourne airport were treated to a series of ads along the lines of "save your daughter's life, take off 5". These motorists were travelling on a road with a legal speed limit of 100km/h, presumably approved as safe by the Victorian Government. How many of their daughters, girlfriends, boyfriends, wives and so on died when they continued to drive at 100km/h?

This is seriously silly stuff, but most serious of all is the persecution of motorists who are travelling over the speed limit by as little as 3km/h and of others who, like the great majority of motorists, do speed moderately at times when they can see it is safe to do so.

Laws that are regularly disobeyed by ordinary, law-abiding citizens are bad laws, and more savage enforcement and ever lower speed limits are not the answer. Asked if he had ever been fined for speeding, Victoria's Police Minister Andre Haermeyer replied: "This is Victoria." Says it all, really. It's time the Victorian Government stopped behaving like it had the road safety problems of China or India. Attention needs to turn to better roads, safer cars and other issues.