Page 1176 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009
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The financial cost can be calculated. The human cost, to families, to dreams and to careers, cannot. We do not have a yardstick equal to that risk or to that task.
Each year about 14 people are killed and 500 are injured on ACT roads. In the five years from 2004 to 2008, that is, during the term of the last Assembly, a total of 76 Canberrans were killed on Canberra’s roads. The economic cost to the community of ACT road crashes has been conservatively estimated to be $220 million a year. Yet we almost seem to regard this as a price we are willing to pay. I want, in this term of the Assembly, to question that price. I want to persuade Canberrans that they are being gypped.
Humans are complex beasts. We are very capable of simultaneously knowing that smoking causes lung cancer yet also believing that we will be among the lucky ones to escape. The statistics are proof that we are not all right. Similarly, we know in a general sense that driving a car involves risk, but we massively underestimate that risk.
In a 2008 book on the science of risk, Canadian Dan Gardener cites the research of a German psychologist who tracked the rise in road deaths in the United States in the 12 months after the 11 September terrorist attacks when Americans en masse shunned air travel in favour of what they assumed was the safety of the roads. The desertion of air travel lasted precisely one year before traffic patterns returned to normal. In those 12 months the road toll rose by 1,595—more than half the total death toll of the 11 September terrorist attacks. To put it another way, more than 1,500 men, women and children died because they seriously, fatally underestimated the risk of turning the key in the family sedan and overestimated their chance of being a victim of terrorism in the skies.
I am certain that everyone here in this Assembly has attended the funeral of or visited in hospital someone whose life has been ended or altered by a momentary lapse of concentration behind the wheel, a desire to beat that red light, an ignorance of the slippery patch around the corner, a crying baby in the capsule in the back, one too many beers at the wedding or one too many mates in the back seat urging the driver on. Speed is a killer—one of many, but a killer nonetheless.
Today we are here to debate what to do with this killer—accept its presence among us or challenge it. I do not think this is a task for just one party in the Assembly but for all of us. That is why I want every party in this place to turn their minds to the debate, not just the government of the day but a committee that represents the breadth of option and spectrum of thought that makes up our community.
To set us on our path, here are a few facts. Lower speeds on the roads mean fewer crashes, simply because road users, including pedestrians, have more time for decision making and vehicles can stop in shorter distances. But that is not all. Crashes that do occur at lower speeds result in less severe injuries because of the lower impact energies involved. If I am driving a car at 50 kilometres per hour and hit a child chasing a ball onto the road, that child is twice as likely to die as he or she would be if I had been travelling at 40 kilometres per hour—a mere 10 kilometres per hour difference, the difference between a suburban street and a school zone. For a motorist it is the difference between getting home at 5.30 pm and getting home at 5.31 pm. For a child it is the difference, perhaps, between life and death.
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