Peter Brock - May his death not be in vain!

As most Australian motorsport fan the loss of Peter Brock today is a tragedy, may it not be in vain!

For years I have been crying out to the safety profession in this country to remove the sources of energy release from the sides of our roads and yet they have continued to waste $millions on training and education believing in some futile effort that they can train drivers not to loose control of their vehicles.

And today's tragic death highlights no matter how much training and experience you have if you loose control of the vehicle and the roads are designed with objects that release energy if hit, you have a high probability of serious injury or death.

This hit wasn't on a straight stretch of road where the vehicle would have been doing high speed but on a sharp bend where the speed wouldn't have been great and proves lowering our speed limits still allows enough energy to be released to kill.

So the only option left is to listen and remove tree's, poles, speed camera's and other objects that release an enormous amount of energy with the loss of the vehicle. And to highlight this fact Peter Brock happens to die on a corner that has claimed 8 lives previously!

If the safety profession responsible for road safety had educated themselves they would have realised after the first death that there was an extremely high risk and if we followed the hierachy of control the first step would be to eliminate that risk. This leaves only 2 options which are practical and the first is to change the road (expensive) and the second is to remove the tree's a good distance from the corner.

So wake up those responsible for road safety and stop focussing on raising revenue for the governments with speed camera's and focuss on the safety principles in risk control and remove the objects from the sides of our roads that release energy and design area's for people to pull over away from the shoulder of the road (need to use mobile phones comes to mind or break down) and we will actually save lives.

But as I've said previously the insurance companies and uneducated safety people have control at the moment and yeild to government pressure to make money or in the case of the insurance companies the government yeilds to them so they make even greater profits and saving lives is not their main aim, even though they spend $billions advertising that they do!

Regards
Daniel