Common Urban Myths About Transport

Myth: Freeways are safer than arterial roads

Fact: Some freeways are safer, others are more dangerous. In any case, building freeways increases the volume of traffic on nearby arterial roads, which experience greater trauma as a result.

Faced with a lack of evidence for congestion reduction or economic benefits from freeways, the road lobby often falls back on the argument that building freeways makes the road system safer. Freeways are safer than ordinary arterial roads, they argue, because they have a lower crash rate per vehicle kilometre. Build more freeways, get fewer crashes!

This argument is at best misleading and at worst false. There is no shortage of evidence for the contrary view, that freeway-building doesn't reduce crash rates at all. According to Vicroads statistics, Victoria's third worst 'black spot' is the stretch of the Monash Freeway in East Malvern, where 54 people died between 1999 and 2004. Victoria's road toll has fluctuated between 350 and 400 a year since 1992, with no significant trend downward, despite all the freeway-building that has occurred in that period.

Freeways fail to improve safety for the same reason they fail to reduce pollution: by encouraging people to drive further, drive more often and use other modes of transport less, they increase the overall level of traffic and hence people's risk of being in a crash. A freeway might be safer than an arterial road if it carried the same amount of traffic, but of course the whole point of freeways is that they increase the amount of traffic - so any inherent safety benefits are cancelled out by growth in traffic volumes.

The two worst black spots in Victoria are Springvale Junction with 112 fatalities and Victoria Parade / Hoddle Street with 61 fatalities between 1999 and 2004. These point to the second reason freeways don't make the road system safer. Most people's journeys don't start or end on freeways, so people still have to navigate the arterial road network before they get onto the freeway and after they get off. As the huge volumes of traffic generated by the freeway spill out onto the arterial road network, they increase the number of crashes occuring on arterial roads. Hoddle Street is a black spot not because of any design flaw with Hoddle Street, but because it is the principal access route to the Eastern Freeway.

Trains, trams and buses are inherently safer than cars to travel in; statistics show that you are at least 10 times less likely to suffer a serious injury travelling by public transport than covering the same distance in a car. Freeway building, by encouraging a massive growth in car travel at the expense of public transport, exposes more people to higher risk and makes the transport system as a whole less safe.

In a common variation on this myth, the road lobby points to the lower road toll per capita in Germany, a country generously provided with non-speed-restricted autobahns. It is certainly true that, according to the OECD's International Road Traffic and Accident Database (IRTAD), Germany's road toll of 8.5 per 100,000 population is lower than Australia's road toll of 9 per 100,000 population. But the real reason for this is that Germans simply do not drive as much as we do (even though they own just as many cars). Sure enough, if one goes to the IRTAD figures for deaths per billion vehicle kilometres (a better measure of actual exposure risk), one gets the opposite story: Germany's toll of 11.3 per billion veh-km actually exceeds Australia's toll of 9.1 per billion veh-km.

The only OECD countries with a lower fatality risk than Australia (whether per person or per vehicle kilometre) are the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands and Britain - all of which have high use of public transport, walking and cycling, along with road safety policies that focus on driver behaviour rather than expansion of limited-access roads.

In summary, empirical evidence both from Melbourne and overseas confirms that road-building leads to higher traffic volumes and hence more crashes, while on the other hand countries with higher public transport use than Australia tend to have a lower per-capita road toll as well.

Return to index

© 2007 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611.
General copying and distribution on a non-commercial basis is permitted subject to proper acknowlegement.
Authorised by Tony Morton, 247 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, for the PTUA

Last modified: 22 June 2006