Road safety: simplistic solutions are dangerous
Speeding is dangerous. Excessive speeding, excessively so. However, a simplistic approach of ‘blame speed for everything and lower speed limits to save lives’ is even more dangerous to road safety.
It’s dangerous because it reduces the debate on a very complex and very technical issue, which can have lethal consequences, to an emotionally charged witch hunt that results in a lot of money changing hands, a lot of overly simplified media stories and a lot of cynicism on the part of motorists.
Consider this: a 19-year-old driver is driving north on South Road, Croydon, at 67 km/h (where the speed limit is 60) in her small hatchback. She has had a little to drink, but is under the legal limit. She notices in her rear view mirror something wrong with her make up, and while she looks at her vanity mirror for just a couple of seconds to fix it, her car veers slightly left (assisted by the heavily sloping road) and hits head-on one of those steel and concrete power poles – which is sitting just 30cm off the road’s edge and parallel to oncoming traffic. The pole, operating like a knife, slices through the crumple zone of the car, easily overcoming its defences, killing instantly the elderly front seat passenger.
Armed with expertise gathered after having watched countless government advertisements on how speed kills and how creepers display reckless hazard perception, and having read or watched at least three stories in the local media recently quoting the Lord Mayor, the Minister of Transport, some lawyer from the RAA and other global authorities on the subject, we effortlessly conclude that obviously speeding was a major contributor to the crash and therefore speed kills. Perhaps lowering the speed limit to 50, or even 40 could have saved another life? Surely if it was 30, hardly any lives would be lost on the roads. The solution to road safety-related trauma is bleeding obvious: slow everybody down to walking pace. Crawling motorists can’t kill.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with complex engineering systems, the problem is much more challenging than this, and may not be obvious to the untrained eye.
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Wegman and Aarts, in a 2004 paper, adapted the D. Orlandella and J.T. Reason “Swiss Cheese” model of accident causation to road safety, and successfully modelled the complexities and chain of events that can combine with lethal consequences – even though they may be quite harmless on their own. Speeding is only one factor, affecting only one of the five layers of the model. A lot of other factors need to line up, on all the other layers, before a serious accident occurs. For example, if the power pole was placed correctly in the imaginary accident above, or a protective barrier was present, the fatality could easily having been avoided.
Professor Wegman was also the Thinker-in-Residence in SA in 2010. During his residence, he compiled one of the most comprehensive reviews of road safety conducted in South Australia, entitled “Driving down the road toll”. In his 80-page report Professor Wegman outlined 16 broad areas where actions and measures were important to improve road safety. One of these areas was “speed management”. Another was “enforcement”. The other 14 areas included recommendations that do not relate to speeding and do not feature much in the media (with the exception of “alcohol and drugs” and, more recently, “distraction”, but only as it relates to mobile phone use).
A set of recommendations like this, from one of the world’s foremost practitioners in the field of road safety, confirms that speeding is only one parameter of the problem and not some panacea that, when addressed, will solve all issues. Indeed, if speeding is the single most important factor for road fatalities, as seems to be the line of the Government and the politically correct media, then how is it that Germany (with thousands of kilometres of speed unrestricted highways) comfortably outperforms South Australia in mortalities per 100,000 people? And how is it that the ACT, with speed limits not dissimilar to SA, and far less “zero tolerance policing” is not just outperforming all other Australian States and Territories but also Germany, The Netherlands and other road safety leading countries as well? Could it be that having the best, most recently designed road system in Australia, which is not stressed by overly heavy traffic, actually saves lives much more effectively than the obsessive policing of “creepers”?
By dumbing down the debate on road safety and diminishing the Government’s responsibilities as the providers of the environment in which we drive, and by creating a simple binary model (speeders are bad; low speed limits are good; nothing else matters much) we divert the public’s attention to a side issue. At the same time, we provide an easy fix for politicians and bureaucrats who are failing us by not providing a driving environment that is safe, well designed, used by roadworthy cars and well trained drivers. To quote Professor Wegman: “It is no longer good enough to blame the road user for all the consequences”.
Stephan Mavrakis is a Professional Engineer who is not a practitioner in the road safety field. He wrote this article in response to David Washington’s opinion piece, Speed denialists zoom past the evidence. Stephan would like to acknowledge David’s support and encouragement in writing this piece – even though their views vary considerably on the topic.
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