With an Australian report in 2000 putting the cost of road crashes at $15 Billion approx each year (Road Crash Costs in Australia Report 2000) and the Northern Territory having unacceptably high death and accident rates something needed to be done to curb the road toll in the NT.
I am totally opossed to the ridiculously low speed limits being applied accross the country reducing the productivity of the country and costing $billions in lost productivity being used along with low tolerence to raise revenue without any real decrease in the road toll.
However I also do not believe that open speed limits are the answer as someone doing 250 km/h or greater not on a well designed race track is a risk far too high to accept.
As I commented and produced a report on the Workplace Health and Safety Forum I will not post it again but just raise some useful points for which I believe the NT government has based their speed limits on.
The first was that the most productive speed limit on our open roads in this report was 130km/h, where this speed was shown to not increase the accident or death rates but increase the productivity of the country by $billions. Over 130km/h accident rates were found to increase dramatically!
Well done to the NT government for focussing on what was the safest most efficient speed and not having the ridiculously low 100km/h speed limits of other states.
It would be good to see the NT government design a road with objects removed from the sides and sand traps or the like to slow speed/energy if a vehicle does loose control and have a main road through the middle of the state that could handle 160km/h with limited risks. As this is a large state/territory that is isolated this would seem to be of great benefit to people in that state.
It was also good to see the focuss shift to alcohol with drink drivers not automatically loosing their license until these changes! I'm sure that will have a major impact on reducing the road toll.
Demerit points are also another positive allowing repeat abusers of the law to be penalised in a severe manor (loosing license) while those that make a simple mistake can keep driving and learn.
I am spewing though I always looked forward to going for a visit to the NT and enjoying driving at a speed that was comfortable and fast, focussing only on the road ahead and not on my speedometer. Now there is no reason to visit the NT, although I hope one day that they design a road that allows for far greater speed than 130 km/h which would allow the enjoyment of driving again. But if it saves a heap of lives then I cannot complain.
Overall a big well done to the NT government for having a realistic speed limit and making an effort to remove drunks from the roads. I suspect the removing of drink drivers will have the major impact on the road toll but we will never know as all the changes will be introduced at the same time.
Maybe they could stagger the introduction of the new laws, with a 6 month or 12 month period between each to evaluate their effectiveness and if we found it was alcohol that was the dramatic factor in road crash reductions and speed had little effect we could reintroduce open limits in some areas.
Regards
Daniel
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