No evidence to suggest lowering the speeding tolerance will do anything but raise rev

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Margaret Wenham
The Courier-Mail
January 01, 2014 12:00Am


IT was nice of the police to cancel Jake Cassidy's $146 fine after The Courier-Mail contacted them about his speeding ticket for going 1km/h over the speed limit.

It was also reported yesterday he was offered an apology too. Lovely.

Amazing how a little bit of media scrutiny can sometimes right a wrong - regulatory overreach or, in this case, copper overkill.

But this little event raises some significant issues that are worth chewing over.

Just how far are the police prepared to go to prosecute their lower speed tolerances, the exact threshold/s of which is or are apparently top secret police business and we're not allowed to know?

Because surely this for-our-eyes-only, non-road rule is open to arbitrary application.

You might get pinged, like Cassidy was, for going one or two kms over the limit. I might get away with going three or four kms over.

It's all in the eye of the speed camera beholder who, if he or she were feeling a little peevish on any given day, could scatter tickets like confetti to all and sundry or perhaps just to those whose jib he or she didn't like the cut of.

And just how necessary is this tightened speed squeeze anyway?

Of course every road death is a tragedy and of course all reasonable measures aimed at minimising road deaths need to be taken.

But I wonder whether police and our law makers are listening to what the statistics are telling us.

According to data in the WHO's Global Status Report on Road Safety 2013, which used 2010 information from 182 countries, it seems Australia now has one of the lowest rates of road deaths in the world, certainly the Western, developed world.
The process is less than objective as a speed camera holder who is feeling a little peevish could scatter tickets like confetti.

In that report, which puts the rate at 6.1 per 100,000 population, we're 14th after first world countries such as a handful of Scandinavian nations, Japan, the Netherlands, Germany - where the red line's the speed limit on autobahns - and the UK.

The most recent road death data here puts the rate even lower - 5.2 per 100,000 population as at November 2013.

We've certainly come a long way since 1975 when the rate was more than five times what it is now at 26.6.

While there's no room for complacency or grounds for relaxing road rules, I wonder about the need for wielding bigger and bigger sledgehammers to crack what is actually a shrinking nut.

Looked at in this light, it's difficult to banish the spectre of revenue raising looming behind Police Commissioner Ian Stewart while he's talking tough about speeding.

The spectre is fed by the absence of evidence that lowering the tolerance threshold by one, two, three, or four kilometres - or whatever it is - will produce tangible road safety results, not just increases in the number of drivers hit with penalties and a $20 million revenue bonanza for police.

I don't know what the general level of goodwill toward police is but things like the Cassidy episode certainly aren't going to bolster it and I doubt this lucrative tinkering with tolerance thresholds will either.

Rather than tightening existing regulations that will see good, safe drivers who might occasionally drift a few kms over the limit being punished for no evidenced-based reason, I'd rather see a strong and determined push for better driver training and education.

Every day, particularly during my peak hour commute to and from work, I dodge more dangerously incompetent drivers than I do overt speedsters.

Margaret Wenham is a Courier-Mail section editor
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