What an unholy alliance: the zealots of the pedestrian and road safety lobbies joining forces with the revenue raisers to call for reduced speed limits in school zones to be enforced 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
One clown, Raphael Grzebieta, professor of road safety at UNSW's Transport and Road Safety Research unit, said the government should make school zones 24 hours and look at reducing speeds in them from 40km to 30km/h.
His reasoning?
"Even at 40km we are travelling at 10km faster than Europe. It's a matter of saving lives or allowing people to travel at speeds which are dangerous to our children."
Let’s get this straight, Raphael: You’re saying that there should be a 30 km/h zone on a six lane, divided road in the middle of the night, just because it passes a school?
You utter fucking clown. How dare you draw a salary at taxpayers’ expense and then talk rubbish like this?
The government would never consider using such zones for revenue raising, would they? 30 km/h on a public road is ridiculous at any time. Of course, if they’re doing it in Europe, we should do it here too. Maybe we can have a European style Court of Human Rights to override government policy and contribute to the Greek bailout as well.
And then he trots out the emotive dichotomy, the favourite device of the illogical and sanctimonious: We can either save lives OR allow people to endanger our children.
You’re right … it really just comes down to that simple choice between good and evil. You wouldn’t be a leftie by any chance, would you Raphael?
Actually, it’s a matter of balancing the two competing goals of freedom and safety. There’s only one way to have no road traffic injuries, pedestrians included: have no cars. If we want the convenience of being able to drive around, we must accept some injuries and even deaths, purely due to accidents (or incompetent driving). People seem reluctant to explicitly accept this, although they tacitly do so.
There is no way to minimize road injuries, because the minimum is zero. In practice, the number of injuries must be minimized with respect to agreed constraints, such as speed limits acceptable to the majority of the public.
When calls are made to remove illogically low speed limits, or not to institute them in the first place, there is always some tool like Raphael Grzebieta who comes out with statistics like: “Well, a 10 km/h reduction in speed limits would lead to a 12% reduction in road deaths.”
Given European data, we can probably extrapolate it via some not unreasonable assumptions to estimate the effect of the speed reduction here.
So fucking what? A 60 km/h reduction in speed limits would lead to a 100% reduction in road deaths, but we’re not going to do it. I shouldn’t have to drive around at 30 or 40km/h just because people can’t teach their children to cross the road. At 3am, they should be in fucking bed, anyway. If children need to cross the road to get to a school in the middle of the night, they are probably going to vandalise it.
The Staysafe report then tries to justify its insane recommendations by reference to the ACT, who have school speed zones 8 hours a day, and South Australia, who have them 24 hours a day. That means they are mad, not that we should follow their example. The ACT parliament is already well known for its lunacy and South Australia was the stronghold of the Australian Democrats.
If you’re going to increase fines and the number of speed cameras, increasing the chances for people to be caught for minor offences, then increase the number of demerit points people have available. The current government already did this early last year.
Can you imagine if Raphael Grzebieta and his wowsers got their way and had 30km/h zones in the middle of the night? It is absurd for people to lose 4 points for forgetting or not knowing about a school zone and driving through it at 41km/h at midnight. Think you’re going through it at a normal speed of 60km/h, but have a slightly miscalibrated speedo and actually be doing say, 62km/h and you’ll lose 6 points. Do that three times in three years and you’ll lose your licence.
That’s just not right. People can’t lose their convenience and in some cases, their ability to work for doing something which is completely within the bounds of acceptably safe driving. This is where lunatics like Raphael Grzebieta must be sidelined. They just do not live in the real world.
It is equally outrageous that two government MPs should chair a committee which recommends increasing both fines and the number of speed traps, when the same government promised on its election that it would remove speed traps that were judged to be mainly for revenue raising and then actually did it.
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