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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4493 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

5. Outside activities such as cars parking, roadworks, accident scenes and other distractions.

6. The age, type, condition and handling characteristics of your vehicle and the possibility of mechanical failure.

It is also interesting to see what it says about driving too fast around town. It says:

Driving too fast in urban areas -

is stressful and tiring on the driver because of its stop/start nature;

wears heavily on the vehicle, especially its brakes, tyres, suspension and steering;

uses more petrol and creates more air and noise pollution;

makes a vehicle's distance and approach speed harder to judge for other people using the road, especially pedestrians and cyclists; and

rarely saves time because of slowing down or stopping for other vehicles, traffic lights and road signs.

It is very interesting that Labor and Liberal are so nervous about this, because I really cannot see the downside of it. It is about 10 kilometres an hour less in residential areas. It is clear that it does not make a lot of difference to overall travel times. It is clear that there are a number of benefits.

It is particularly interesting because we are having a lot of traffic calming put in our suburbs at the moment and we have had a lot of discussion about rat-running through the suburbs. Obviously, there are advantages here in having a lower speed as well because the speeding and slowing down that are occurring with traffic calming have environmental consequences, as I have just outlined. It is also going to be likely to discourage slightly the commuters who are rat-running if there is a slower speed limit within the suburbs. Even though, apparently, it is not going to make that much difference to the overall travel time, there is a psychological issue here, in that they might feel it is not quite as attractive.

Mr Kaine also said that roads are part of the neighbourhood and should be shared. He acknowledged that the majority of the traffic is generated by the local community and it has a duty of care. I absolutely agree; the local community does have a duty of care. Obviously, given the statistics for the ACT, a significant number of people are not meeting that duty of care. According to the figures from Mr Kaine, 30 per cent of fatal accidents and 40 per cent of all crashes in the ACT are not on the arterial road system. We can see from the Australian College of Road Safety submission to the Staysafe inquiry that by reducing the speed limit by 10 kilometres an hour there is a 15 per cent drop in accidents, a 20 per cent drop in injuries and a 25 per cent drop in fatalities. What that shows for Canberra is that the reduction that we could see in the number of accidents and deaths that occur on our roads would be significant, and the cost savings would be far greater than the $1.5m Mr Kaine has talked about.

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