Teaching people good driving skills is unlikely to be any more effective than harsh speeding penalties. The real fix is better road design.
Both speed enforcement and “git good” are essentially individual approaches to the problem. But it’s not an individual problem. It’s a systemic problem. We need roads that don’t have driveways and side streets on them every 20 m, and streets that are narrow and low speed. We need intersections which provide for short crossings for pedestrians and a clear view for drivers where they only need to be aware of one thing at a time with sharp right angles rather than smooth slip lanes. We need safe, separated, direct cycle paths so people sitting on top of 10 kg bicycles aren’t being passed within arm reach by 2 tonnes of steel going more than twice their speed.
The only way to make our roads safer is to idiot-proof the design of them. But we don’t do that. Instead, we prioritise car throughput every single time, and it kills people. Politicians and road engineers need to be held legally accountable for the deaths caused by the designs they approve.
That is a good point, I do think a lot of ‘speeding’ issues come down to limits that are set too low for what people consider a natural speed for a section of road. I definitely agree that if you want people to drive slowly the road should encourage that speed - narrower lanes, curves, tree plantings etc help. Instead you get situations like how the ACT gov dropped a good section of wide three lane arterial road from 60km/h to 40km/h, changed nothing but the signs, and then acted shocked that the vast majority of people were now speeding…
Yeah, exactly so! It would make so much more sense to cut that section down to 1 lane each way plus a fully separated bike path, but our councils and state governments insist on every road being both a place where businesses and homes can be located and an efficient route for cars to bypass.
It does piss me off a bit that cars handle and perform better and are way safer than they were, but speeds keep reducing.
Then I remember that today’s top 3 selling vehicles are trucks, and the average ‘car’ is actually a SUV which weigh about 50% more than a Falcon or Commodore used to.
So we’re probably lucky they haven’t halved all the road speeds lol
No they aren’t. They are for the people in them, but if anything the average (mean) car is more dangerous now than it used to be for people outside of the car, thanks to the rise of ridiculous yank tanks.
If anything, the problem is that our speed limits are too high still on streets where people live and where they’re accessing businesses.
Teaching people good driving skills is unlikely to be any more effective than harsh speeding penalties. The real fix is better road design.
Both speed enforcement and “git good” are essentially individual approaches to the problem. But it’s not an individual problem. It’s a systemic problem. We need roads that don’t have driveways and side streets on them every 20 m, and streets that are narrow and low speed. We need intersections which provide for short crossings for pedestrians and a clear view for drivers where they only need to be aware of one thing at a time with sharp right angles rather than smooth slip lanes. We need safe, separated, direct cycle paths so people sitting on top of 10 kg bicycles aren’t being passed within arm reach by 2 tonnes of steel going more than twice their speed.
The only way to make our roads safer is to idiot-proof the design of them. But we don’t do that. Instead, we prioritise car throughput every single time, and it kills people. Politicians and road engineers need to be held legally accountable for the deaths caused by the designs they approve.
That is a good point, I do think a lot of ‘speeding’ issues come down to limits that are set too low for what people consider a natural speed for a section of road. I definitely agree that if you want people to drive slowly the road should encourage that speed - narrower lanes, curves, tree plantings etc help. Instead you get situations like how the ACT gov dropped a good section of wide three lane arterial road from 60km/h to 40km/h, changed nothing but the signs, and then acted shocked that the vast majority of people were now speeding…
Yeah, exactly so! It would make so much more sense to cut that section down to 1 lane each way plus a fully separated bike path, but our councils and state governments insist on every road being both a place where businesses and homes can be located and an efficient route for cars to bypass.
It does piss me off a bit that cars handle and perform better and are way safer than they were, but speeds keep reducing.
Then I remember that today’s top 3 selling vehicles are trucks, and the average ‘car’ is actually a SUV which weigh about 50% more than a Falcon or Commodore used to.
So we’re probably lucky they haven’t halved all the road speeds lol
No they aren’t. They are for the people in them, but if anything the average (mean) car is more dangerous now than it used to be for people outside of the car, thanks to the rise of ridiculous yank tanks.
If anything, the problem is that our speed limits are too high still on streets where people live and where they’re accessing businesses.