Creating a “Third Tier” for Road Safety

Abstract

Australia has been heading down a dead-end land transport route for more than half a century. We seem to be almost obsessed with an over-reliance on road-use for both passenger and freight transport. Yet, this direction we keep travelling has always been unsustainable, unaffordable and, most relevant to our efforts for road safety, very unsafe. Our road-use is carried out in an unsafe-incident-rich, hazard-filled environment on a road system so under-funded and inadequate to the task that it contributes to up to 30% of crashes occurring and to the severity of a massive number of crash outcomes. The risk levels on our roads are too often significantly downplayed by assessment limited to crash, death and injury statistics, and/or traffic violations. In the actual everyday situation on our roads, thousands of risks are taken by road users, too often putting other road users and even road-side users at risk. It is very often like a strange and dangerous game of ‘dodgems’ where dangerous high risk evasion and ‘chance’ plays far too much of a role. And while Australia has often been applauded for its work with road safety audits, somewhere between the theory of the benefits of auditing and actual road upgrades, something seems to go awry.