It's Hardly Up To Speed

Newcastle Herald

Wednesday October 24, 2007

Jeff Corbett

I'M grateful that you don't drive at 60 kmh down my street, with my youngest son and his mates cruising on their bikes between their various homes, neighbours' younger children frolicking on the nature strip and older children kicking a football. And I'm happy to drive at no more than 50 kmh in your residential street.

It seems reckless now to drive along a suburban street at 60 kmh, but not so long ago we did, despite the fact that we saw ourselves as safe drivers concerned especially for children.

Ten years ago this month Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and 12 other council areas in NSW began trialling 50 kmh zones for local roads, as most residential streets are classified, and I wrote in this column that 50 kmh was too fast. Why not 25 kmh for local streets, I asked, because the only people who'd be inconvenienced would be the impatient short-cutters using residential streets to avoid arterial roads?

The crawling 25 kmh would be much safer than 50 kmh, speeding drivers would be conspicuous and to a great degree people could reclaim the streets. And in any event, I doubted that the new limit of 50 kmh would produce a 10 kmh fall in average speed.

Indeed, Newcastle City Council found in the six-month trial that average speeds dropped by only 1.3 kmh in streets that moved from 60 kmh to 50 kmh, although it claimed there were 28 per cent fewer casualties in these streets.

We're accustomed to the 50 kmh limit now and I'd be surprised if averages in those zones haven't fallen by more than 5 kmh.

And it is just coincidence that a decade after the first 50 kmh limits were posted in our streets, a decade to the month, the Australasian Road Safety Conference is the scene of a push for a lowering of that limit to 30 kmh in all local residential streets. Not my suggested 25 kmh, but close enough.

I'm all in favour but both the RTA and the NRMA are not they see no great benefit in the lower limit. But, I say, they were happy to support the lower 50 kmh limit on the basis that it was worthwhile if it saved one life or kept one child out of a wheelchair, so surely the same applies to 30 kmh!

According to a researcher with the Monash University Accident Research Centre, Jeffery Archer, most pedestrians survive if they are hit by a vehicle at 30 kmh or less, most die if hit by a vehicle at 60 kmh or more, so not only are you much less likely to be hit if the vehicle is travelling at 30 kmh, you are much more likely to be able to pull the driver's nose.

Dr Archer told the Australasian Road Safety Conference last week that an RTA study found in the year 2000 that while average speeds had dropped only 1 kmh in the first two years of 50 kmh zones, casualty crashes in these areas had fallen 22 per cent. Imagine, then, the impact of 30 kmh!

And Stockholm now had a 30 kmh default speed limit for local residential streets, he said, but I say the Swedes are too wholesome for us to attach too much to this.

Just over three years ago the first of the new 40 kmh limits for streets with high pedestrian activity were introduced to Newcastle, and while I was peeved, I accepted that nobody driving safely along Newcastle's Darby and Beaumont streets would be driving at 60 kmh or even 50 kmh.

Today it seems to me that anyone driving at 60 kmh down either of those streets would be endangering life.

Where, I asked three years ago, would it end? At 20 kmh? Well, Dr Archer has called for a 30 kmh limit for these areas too.

Inconsistency is an issue in our likely response to lower speed limits. The 50 kmh zones have expanded in some council areas to include many thoroughfare roads that are bordered by houses but are no longer, if they ever were, local residential streets.

Complexity is a greater difficulty. In the 11-kilometre journey between my work in inner Newcastle and Charlestown yesterday I travelled through 11 speed zones, with just one of those a school zone. I suspect the need to scan continuously for speed signs and the congestion caused by changing speeds create more dangers than the speed limits remove.

The entire system needs a bold rethink, preferably not by the people responsible for the current mishmash.

jcorbett@theherald.com.au

© 2007 Newcastle Herald

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