Speeding fines a safety risk

Tis the season to count the tolls - the death toll and the tolls exacted from road users rash enough to drive during the holiday period.

 Both are, as ever, sure to be unacceptably high. The reasons are not mysterious: our road infrastructure is inadequate at the quietist times; our driving standard is lamentable due to licensing requirements that could be achieved by a chimpanzee; enforcement increasingly takes the form of cash accruing cameras.

No roads minister or the RTA can explain how furtively taking a photo and sending a fine through the post curtails the act of dangerous driving, as opposed to profiting by it after the offence has been recorded.  The visible presence of the Highway Patrol is the best means of deterring speeding or mayhem in general.

On Boxing Day morning, I drove from inner Sydney along Parramatta Rd onto the western freeway and thence along the amusingly named “Great'' Western Highway to the far side of the Great Dividing Range, returning the following day by the same roads. I saw dozens of instances of illegal and unsafe motoring, not least that metropolitan speciality of driving beneath the speed limit in the overtaking lane. As a result there was much undercutting, but almost no indicating, and no shortage of grossly polluting bombs _ often with P-plates attached.

Following me west a few hours later, my wife and daughter were hugely lucky not to become collateral damage in a grotesque road rage incident. Their car was struck by a CD thrown from a sedan at a family’s SUV. The sedan swerved dangerously in front of the SUV on the busy freeway, forcing it to pull over. This she reported to Triple 0 after prolonged attempts to get through.

Yet in an aggregate trip of 300km at the busiest time of the year, made more fraught by rain and heavy fog (in which many motorists saw no need to use any lights), I saw all of two police vehicles, both on the return leg. One, an unmarked dark green Commodore, appeared to have snared a Corolla in the Lower Blue Mountains. On the freeway - in grim, grey weather remember - a marked unit was parked without illumination on the painted strip between a merging lane and the freeway proper.

The point is the Highway Patrol is at its most effective - which is to say deterring dangerous driving - when it can be seen. The most obnoxious boy racer backs right off when the HP are known to be about. Those who inadvertently drift over the limit - and the huge majority of speeding offences occur in the lowest range - tend not to. No, the police can't be everywhere. Yes, there needs to be more of them. But they can be in more places applying the brake of prevention. That would contribute to a lower road toll, even at the cost of State Government revenue.