Page 774 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 March 1991
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for residents in these streets. Many times through that address Mr Stevenson seemed to identify the major problem as being the fact that residents might find that their visitors, by parking in the streets with these painted islands, somehow regarded themselves as parking their cars in an unsafe area.
The modified road cross-section increases safety in a number of significant ways. For pedestrians, the task of crossing a road is broken into simple steps of crossing a narrow one-way traffic stream to the median area and then repeating the process for traffic travelling in the opposite direction. No longer does a pedestrian have to wait until the gap in both directions of traffic is long enough to cross the whole roadway in one move. And, of course, for children this can be a particularly significant improvement. The time and coordination required for children to look at two lanes travelling in opposite directions and assess when there is a sufficient time gap for them to cross both is significantly reduced when they have to look for and concentrate on traffic coming in only one direction at a time. They can get to the safety island in the centre, whether it be a painted strip or a concreted median strip, and they can then concentrate on crossing the remaining half of the road.
For motorists, the roadway no longer resembles a wide arterial road where overtaking is unrestricted and where high speeds are encouraged. Surveys of traffic speeds indicate that the modified road cross-section reduces vehicular speeds to be more consistent with the signposted speed limit, but without the need for additional police enforcement. Of course, that is another issue that needs to be addressed as well. It is all very well to have these great ideas of educating motorists to restrict themselves to a safe speed, but one must take account of the additional cost of having police enforcement, et cetera. I think the people generally would prefer to go into an area where they are constrained by conditions rather than by police officers.
This Government is not prepared to compromise the safety of ACT pedestrians and/or road users. I believe that we have demonstrated our commitment to ensuring that road safety standards in the ACT continue to be, frankly, the envy of other States and Territories. Whilst it is all very easy for someone like me to stand up here and say that we are the envy of the States and Territories and that this is the safest possible picture, undoubtedly at some time in the future - God forbid - there will be an accident or a fatality involving a child going to school. It does not matter what system is introduced. No matter how fine the system or how good your intentions, that is going to happen. That is the nature of the human condition. I do firmly believe, though, that the systems that we have introduced will minimise that risk to more than just an acceptable risk; I think they have minimised it to the
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