xsfer

More contentious is the sales job to persuade the public that the speed enforcement campaign against small-time speeders is based on solid evidence. In TAC television advertisements, on police websites, and in the arrive alive! strategy document, a little graph always turns up. It is the "crash risk by travel speed" graph, based on 1997 research at the Road Accident Research Unit at Adelaide University. That study looked at the travel speeds of vehicles involved in crashes in metropolitan Adelaide, compared the speeds with the average on those roads and concluded: "The risk of involvement in a casualty crash doubled with each 5 km/h increase in free travelling speed above 60 km/h."

That is the study that has been used to persuade the public that the whole campaign to target small-time speeders is justifiable. John Lambert, the manager of road safety for VicRoads until the mid-1990s and now an independent consultant, read the study, saw the accompanying TAC television campaign and thought it was "just bullshit". Lambert tried to get the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to investigate the TAC for misleading advertising, but he says they politely declined.

http://theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/18/1...4360633943.html

Muz

'And what the State Government has not told you is that other countries have achieved similar success without such punitive measures.'

Of course. They wouldn't want to threaten the cash cow.

'The federal road safety action plan, for instance, estimates that safer roads - not changing driver behaviour - would have the biggest single impact on the road toll and could save more than 300 lives a year nationally.'

At last, common sense has a say in the matter.

"I'm going to say something I'll probably regret," says Ian Johnston, the director of Monash University's Accident Research Centre, which provided the research and arguments that underpin the Government's speed strategy. "It has been very convenient (for governments) to go along with the community belief that it's all about bad behaviour, because then you don't have to invest so much in infrastructure."

Now we're getting closer to the root of the matter.

It would be nice to see the Government take some of the multi-billion dollar surplus (appropriated from us in GST) and put it back into public infrastructure instead of using it for their own ends (i.e. a convenient tool for pre-election tax cut promises).