Page 936 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 17 June 1992
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ACT we are really talking about the Tuggeranong Parkway and the Eastern Parkway - in both cases two-lane roads and in both cases roads where the problem is usually not to encourage people to drive fast enough but rather to encourage people to drive only as fast as the law will provide. In wet weather or foggy weather Canberra residents seem to regard the posted speed limit as a sort of statutory minimum. We often have problems in wet or foggy weather when cars skid all over the place; we have multiple pile-ups. For some reason we have difficulty in the ACT in persuading people to adjust their speeds to relevant conditions, but that is a matter that I guess we have to keep educating the community on. It is by educating the community that I think we will address Mr Westende's
I can acknowledge a couple of points where you sometimes feel some frustration at slower moving traffic, in particular, I think, coming northbound into the city. As you leave Kambah you come up a bit of a hill. There is a sweep to the road. That is an area where often commercial vehicles, lower powered vehicles, can be a little slower. I would be proposing that at some points like that in the ACT, and that is one that comes to mind immediately, we perhaps will erect some signs saying "keep left unless overtaking", or the other indicative sign that you often see on New South Wales country roads, "slow vehicles use left lane", in order to provide a bit of guidance to people.
If we were to impose the statutory provision and make it an offence to travel in the right-hand lane unless overtaking - we are talking about a fairly limited area of road in the ACT, all of it two-lane, and a road area where, in most cases, people are travelling at or, to be honest, over the speed limit - effectively we would be reducing two lanes of traffic to one lane of traffic because people would be required by law to travel in the left-hand lane unless overtaking. If traffic in the left-hand lane is travelling at or about the speed limit, by definition, to overtake, you are speeding. It really would have an adverse effect on traffic flow in those circumstances of, essentially, two-lane highways.
We have a fairly limited area of road. Mr Westende's amendment applies only to roads with a limit of over 80 kilometres an hour, so we are not talking about the general arterial road network within the city of Canberra. We are talking about those roads where a 100 kilometres an hour limit applies, and that is, essentially, as we said, the parkway or the eastern distributor. I would certainly remind people that on the eastern distributor there are points, as you are heading southbound, where you can, in fact, turn right from the right-hand lane. So, again, we start to introduce some confusion where that occurs.
If you think of driving in Sydney or Melbourne, or on any of the freeways where this sort of law does apply and, I acknowledge, works quite well, there are no points on those freeways where you would be turning right from a right-hand lane. The freeways are so constructed that the traffic leaving the freeway will always leave on an exit ramp down or up the left-hand side and then go either under or over. So a road network where you have the possibility of a right-hand turn or a right-hand exit from a speed above 80 kilometres an hour raises problems with Mr Westende's law.
Mr Westende's amendment raises some sensible concerns. He mentioned some of the frustrations that drivers may feel if, at particular points on the parkway, slower vehicles are in the right-hand lane and thus blocking traffic flow. I think we should try first an educative approach, and I would have thought that that
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