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Melbourne Transport |
Common Urban Myths About TransportMyth:
Spending more money on roads makes us safer
Fact:
Spending more money on roads encourages more trips to be made by car and
fewer by public transport, walking or cycling. Increased traffic volumes
mean more crashes, regardless of how big the roads are.
A variation on the freeways-are-safer argument says that widening of arterial roads can be justified solely on safety grounds. There was at least one sighting of this particular myth during the 2004 Federal election campaign:
The RACV naturally likes this argument too, and trots it out regularly.
The RACV's latest initiative is its 'five-star safety rating' system for country highways, complete with a map showing the 'safe' roads in green and the 'unsafe' ones in red. It's easy to get the mistaken impression that these ratings reflect actual crash statistics. The way they're actually assigned is by road engineers looking at the road and counting up the features they deem to be 'safe' (such as dual carriageways and nice wide lanes) or 'unsafe' (such as trees by the road, or intersections without proper freeway-style junctions). Roads can be assigned a 'dangerous' one or two-star rating even if they've recorded no crashes for years. All this is just the road lobby up to its same old tricks: taking legitimate community concerns about road trauma, and manipulating them into a campaign to build more roads. It's no doubt very convenient that the biggest, widest roads - the sort that invite high levels of induced traffic - are automatically judged the 'safest' by the RACV's criteria. Yet it's also true that the 'safest' roads in their survey are also the ones (such as the Hume Highway) that tend to record the highest crash rates - because they are the ones that carry the highest volumes of traffic and have consequently attracted the most spending. This is what makes nonsense of the road lobby's basic premise. Widening a road, or converting it from single to dual carriageway, has the primary effect of increasing the volume of traffic on the road. People take advantage of the superior level of service offered by the new road to drive on it further and more often, or are forced to when the new road is used as an excuse to close down local services. Meanwhile, the single greatest factor determining the level of road trauma is the volume of traffic - as more and more cars use a road more and more often, there is more opportunity for crashes, even if all the cars are travelling in the same direction. Then there is the phenomenon of 'risk compensation', noted by many safety researchers, where drivers react to improved roads by driving faster and with less care. Thus, one finds that Victoria's three worst black spots are all on dual-carriageway roads. This fact is not lost on RACV members:
Sadly, the tragic sixfold fatality in Mildura in February 2006 (involving people who weren't even on the road at the time) shows that the most horrific incidents can occur even on perfectly straight roads with little traffic and no evident hazards. Dual carriageways are no panacea either, as shown by a litany of tragic crashes: a fivefold fatality on the Bass Highway in Tasmania in February 2006, a smash on the 'four-star' Hume Freeway at Glenrowan that killed three people just before Christmas in 2007, and the fivefold fatality on Plenty Road in Melbourne in January 2010.
Heightened risk exposure goes hand in hand with greater traffic volumes, and is the major reason why Victoria's road toll remained static - hovering around 400 deaths per year between 1992 and 2002 - despite a continuing rollout of new road safety measures (not to mention an unprecedented level of spending on new roads). While the risk of being injured on the road - as measured by the number of injuries per kilometre travelled - has indeed decreased, the increase in the number of kilometres travelled completely cancelled it out, so the actual number of injuries per year was no less in 2002 than ten years earlier. The stand-out record for the biggest decline in the road toll is still held by the years just prior to 1992, coinciding with the introduction of automatic speed cameras and higher rates of random breath testing. (It was also a time when public transport briefly increased its share of travel at the expense of the car.)
Source: Transport Accident Commission (www.tacsafety.com.au) Subsequent movements in the road toll tell a similar story. In 2003, there was a small but sustained drop of about 15%, from an average of 400 to an average of about 340. But there was no downward trend - rather there seems to have been a one-off change between 2002 and 2003, most likely resulting from something that changed in 2002. This was not a big year for new roads (CityLink had opened a full three years earlier, and the Hallam Bypass was still under construction). On the other hand, the controversial reduction in the speed limit tolerance from 10 per cent to 3kph, and the TAC's 'Wipe Off 5' campaign, both commenced in 2002. Road safety researchers generally consider this to have caused the one-off drop in the road toll. Once again, the evidence indicates it is stricter enforcement rather than new roads that makes us safer.
A further 'step change' in the road toll seems to have occured in 2008. This time the one-off drop is only about 10%, from 340 to about 300. There was one motorway opened around this time (Eastlink in June 2008) but this came a little too late to be a convincing explanation for the drop. Meanwhile, official statistics indicate that between 2006-07 and 2007-08 there was a slight dip in overall car travel, defying the usual year-on-year growth. A reduction in car travel is likely to be at least a contributing factor.
Occasionally one finds official statements (rather than just road lobby spin) to the effect that bigger roads are safer roads, but further investigation fails to reveal any evidence for these assertions. Thus, road lobbyists often rely on this statement from the National Road Safety Strategy:
This claim that spending money on new roads is the 'single most significant' safety measure comes from a pie chart in the Appendix (page 29 of the same document) which postulates that road-building would reduce expected casualties by 19 per cent, compared with 10 per cent by improving vehicle occupant protection and 9 per cent by improving road user behaviour. If one looks for the source of these figures, one finds the following:
In other words, the basis for this seemingly authoritative assertion is an undocumented calculation based on an unpublished report by two road engineers. So even this high-level official source fails to cite any published figures; needless to say, the many other sources within the road lobby don't bother either. Instead they rely on the principle of truth by repetition: say something often enough and loud enough and people will come to believe it. When one actually looks at published figures on the factors that reduce road trauma, they tend to support a quite different conclusion. The biggest reductions come from measures that focus on driver behaviour (such as speed cameras and booze buses), with smaller reductions coming from road works (such as blackspot treatments). The figures also confirm that a large factor in road trauma is the volume of traffic, which in a car-dependent society like Australia closely follows the level of overall economic activity.
Source: Monash University Accident Research Centre. Further modelling of some major factors influencing road trauma trends in Victoria: 1990-96, Report No.129, 1998. Medical professionals also study the causes of road trauma, just as they study the causes and spread of disease epidemics. Here too we find the view that driver behaviour, and not the size of the roads, should be the focus.
But perhaps the last word should go to the police, who have seen more than enough crashes to understand the causes.
Just as building more roads doesn't solve traffic congestion, it doesn't make our cities any safer either, and for the same reason - it just encourages more and more car trips and fewer public transport, walking and cycling trips, which are less risky on the whole. © 2010 Public Transport Users Association Inc. (PTUA), Victoria, Australia. ABN 83 801 487 611. Last modified: 19 January 2010
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