How much could be saved with road redesign and construction?

Well if we look at S.A. figures (they are pretty up to date, Well Done!) the annual cost of road accidents is approx. $1.18 Billion and if we consider a few other states road tolls are far greater than South Australia's we can see there is scope for huge cost savings.

If we removed the trees, poles, ability to have head on's and other objects that release energy then it would be at least 50% of that figure and I would say we could reduce the road toll even further with these initiatives.

In fact just removing the ability to have head on accidents would reduce the road toll by a large percentage, easily!

So if the state put in half a $Billion a year in redesigning the roads it would pay for itself! And I would make the assumption that it would also reduce other accidents where vehicles have run off the road trying to aviod a head on, which would be a good percentage of road accidents, in themselves.

But we look at Victoria and what they have is lots of money wasted on people making up formula's for calculating whether it's financially profitable to seal the sides of our roads even though sealing the sides of roads reduces the accident rates in those areas! Example of some of that waste of money below:

*s houlder sealing was associated with a statistically significant reduction in casualty accident frequencies at sites where it was installed on 2-lane 2-way rural highways in Victoria,
* casualty accidents were reduced by 43 per cent, on a per vehicle kilometre basis, at such sites,
* this is equivalent to a reduction of 0.073 casualty accidents per million vehicle kilometres,
* the breakeven point (the point at which it is economically worthwhile) to install sealed shoulders is at a traffic flow of about 350 veh/d,
* the benefit/cost ratio of shoulder sealing can be calculated from:

benefit/cost ratio = 2.9 x (AADT in thousands)
where AADT is Annual Average Daily Traffic

* for example, if the AADT is 4,000 veh/d, a benefit/cost ration of about 11.6:1 could be expected,
* the main accident reductions are in rear end, overtaking - out of control, off carriageway to left, and off carriageway to right into fixed object crashes.

Now it's all well and good being able to do calculations like that but when they show you reduce the road toll, how can you justify the cost of a life???????

Isn't that what taxes are for, to protect the people????? So redesign the roads and stop killing people!

Regards
Daniel