By
EWAN KENNEDY
25 December 2006
A recent major road-safety report from the United Kingdom
shows that approximately one vehicle crash in 20 is caused by
inappropriate speed. Which resulted in an interesting email from the
local organisation representing motorists, the NMAA (National Motorists’
Association of Australia) on exactly that subject.
The NMAA reports on just-published findings of the South
Australian government on road crashes in 2005, these show similar
results in this country to those in the UK. The report, ‘SA Road Crash
Facts 2005’ says, ‘Police reported that 7 South Australians died due
to excessive speed in 2005’. The NMAA says that's seven out of 147, or
slightly less than five per cent.
The NMAA then comes up with some interesting
observations, "They [the authors of the report] don't clarify what
they mean by excessive speed - is it purely speed in excess of the speed
limit or does it include speed excessive for the conditions but under
the speed limit? Historically, in nearly all Australian reports and
statistical compilations, ‘excessive speed’ includes both. So it is
odds-on that the number of SA fatalities ‘due to exceeding the speed
limit’ in 2005 was less than half of all ‘excessive speed’
fatalities."
The association then asks, "And how many of those
involved stolen vehicles, police chases and other illegal activity?
Quite likely more than half, so now we are down to less then two per
cent of road fatalities primarily caused by an otherwise legal
driver/rider exceeding the speed limit; and that's a generous
estimate."
The NMAA concludes by asking, "So exactly how is
obsessive speed limit enforcement, particularly using hidden speed
cameras, supposed to have anything other than a tiny effect on road
safety?"
Attention is then turned to a further very interesting
section of the SA Report, "Inattention was reported as the cause of
32 per cent of fatal crashes and 44 per cent of serious injury crashes
in 2005.
"Putting this together, the answer to improving SA
road safety is obvious - we need hundreds of inattention cameras!"
That final remark was probably made humorously, but it
need not be so. The notion of ‘inattention cameras’ may appear to be
a silly one, but as I've said in the past, if police spent more time
patrolling our roads watching out for stupid behaviour, and less time
hiding behind bushes taking photographs of vehicles that are technically
exceeding speed limits, they would achieve a lot more in the way of
genuine road safety.
Not only that, the police would also gain considerably
more respect in our community. Visible policemen and women enforcing
genuinely bad behaviour on the road would soon gain a lot of applause
from their fellow motorists. And that should domino into further driving
improvements.
