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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4428 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

is the hierarchical nature of our road network, which has been designed according to the type of traffic that each road is meant to carry. They have been well maintained, too. Streets providing direct access to residential dwellings or community amenities, such as schools, have lower traffic volumes and speeds, and traffic moving between suburbs is carried on arterial roads which are specifically designed to cater for high traffic volumes and speeds.

A critical factor which is often forgotten in this debate is that the 50 kilometres an hour limit, if it is applied, will not be a blanket limit. Rather, it will apply only in those mainly low traffic volume suburban streets which already have relatively low crash rates anyway. In the ACT more than 70 per cent of all fatal crashes and 60 per cent of all crashes in the past six years have occurred on the arterial road system, and lowering the speed limit in residential areas to 50 kilometres an hour will have only a very limited impact on ACT's crash statistics, and the consequences of them.

No matter how good the roads are, the critical factor in serious road crashes is usually driver behaviour. In spite of an excellent ACT road system, individual drivers usually get injured because they ignore speed limits, because they drink and drive, or because they take other unnecessary risks - in other words, just bad behaviour on our roads. Even with the best record in the country, more than 700 ACT residents suffer injury or death on the roads each year and road trauma costs our community over $140m annually. This is too high. It is too high a price for any community to pay, in my view. We, the Government, are determined to change this and we have been addressing the tough area of driver attitudes and behaviour through two important programs. This is the point that I made earlier in connection with Ms Tucker's comments in her opening address. The point is that attitudinal change needs to be brought about. That seems to me to be the significant factor in the road accident rate in the Territory, rather than the quality of the roads or the speeds that are permitted.

The first thing that we have done is to introduce a competency-based training and assessment scheme for learner drivers which focuses heavily on the importance of good driver attitudes so that young drivers will be motivated to want to drive safely, to the extent possible. A number of driving instructors are now accredited to teach and assess learning options for the scheme, and I handed the first graduating class their certificates on Monday morning of this week. The second initiative is the new educational program for novice drivers, "New Drivers: New Attitudes", which is to be introduced into Years 10, 11 and 12 in ACT high schools and colleges in 1999. This program will also be available to young drivers who have left school.

Turning to the area of costs, it has been estimated that it would cost the ACT about $11/2m to implement a 50 kilometres an hour speed limit in residential areas. There may well be better value road options, such as education and enforcement, which more directly and effectively target drivers' attitudes and behaviour and bring about the better safety record that Ms Tucker is seeking to achieve. Having regard to our unique circumstances in terms of our road system, the quality of those roads and other things that the Government is doing to address the problem, I believe it is inadvisable to rush in blindly and adopt the 50 kilometres an hour residential area speed limit when we do not know that it is either necessary or justified or what the results of doing so will be.

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