I’ve seen a number of interesting things in relation to road safety lately, some of which have caused me to revise my thoughts.
First, there’s the question of retesting for older drivers. This seemed self-evidently desirable to me, based on data showing very high fatality rates per km driven and that in most collision involving older (75+) drivers they are at fault. However, a Twitter discussion (must work out how to do Storify!) following this Background Briefing showed that things aren’t nearly so clear-cut. The fatality evidence isn’t really helpful, since it just reflects the fact that an accident is more likely to be fatal to an older person than to a younger one. The differential hazard is far greater for falls, which suggests that forcing older people out of cars may not be beneficial. And overall, the evidence on the benefits of testing appears to be mixed at best (the Monash expert quoted in BB overstates the case a bit, in my view).
More directly relevant to me (at least for the next decade or two) there are some suggestions regarding cyclist: a one-meter clearance requirement for cars , relaxation of abolition of helmet laws and requirements for licensing, rego and third-party insurance. The first is obviously sensible, the big issue being enforcement. On the third, I agree in principle with licensing and TPI, the main problem being what to do about children. Registration seems undesirable until we have a proper system of road pricing.
On helmets, I’m genuinely ambivalent, particularly after witnessing a head impact accident this morning (no injury, thanks to helmet). I would always use a helmet, but I’m not happy about the claim that Australia should have different helmet laws than Europe because our roads are more dangerous, and our drivers more aggressive. Granted that this is true we need to change these conditions. The obvious first step would be to reduce the current 60/50 speed limits for suburban streets and subarterial roads respectively to 50/40. This would greatly benefit road users (including both cyclists and older drivers) who can’t or don’t want to travel at or near existing speed limits. The welfare cost of slightly lower limits would, in my view, be trivial. I have zero sympathy for those (echoing smokers and polluters of all kinds) who want their convenience to justify imposing risks on others.
The other point though relates to those aggressive drivers. Whereas the evidence on older drivers is weak, there is ample evidence that aggressive driving, manifested particularly in traffic violations, is associated with higher crash risk, as is at-fault involvement in a previous crash. The current points system is absurdly lenient in this respect. The 12 point allowance lets drivers be convicted over a serious offence (running stop lights, speeding in a school zone etc) every year without any restriction on driving, and the suspension period for violators is only few months. I’d suggest a lifetime allowance of 24 points, with permanent restrictions thereafter, as well as reducing the three year allowance to 8 points, and increasing suspension periods.
The restrictive treatment of drivers at the older and younger ends of the age spectrum contrasts sharply with the treatment of a drivers license as a natural right for the 25-75 group, to be withdrawn only in extreme cases. In my view, aggressive drivers should be taken off the road to make them safer for the rest of us, including non-motorists and those whose reflexes aren’t sharp enough to cope with the high-speed high-risk driving of others.
John Quiggin 
John – on the enforceability, I think it’s more of a move to where the liability lies in the event of an accident: if you kill a cyclist…clearly you didn’t give them a metre.
The Economist had an interesting take on how strict liability in the Netherlands had changed the number of cycling deaths
Not everyone agrees strict liability is effective.
And on registration – check out pps 102-106 of the Qld govt. Study that recommended the 1m rule experiment.
cheers
“relaxation of abolition of helmet laws and requirements for licensing” is there something missing here?
One factor that may be overlooked is that health care professionals are often eager to get old people to continue driving after a health crisis because returning to old habits is associated with good recovery while failure to return to old habits and/or decline of social activity is associated with poor recovery. I don’t know how much of a health benefit is gained from keeping older people on the road, but I would guess it’s large enough that it shouldn’t be ignored.
There are also social equity concerns with bicycle registration. Bicycles are stereotypically used by people who can’t afford cars and there’s a lot of truth in that. Which means that any additional impost needs to be small enough that someone who can barely afford a bicycle can afford registration. Meaning an upper limit of perhaps $20/year. The estimates I’ve seen for the administration cost of registration start at about $100/year, suggesting that registration would be a significant cost to the state and any benefit would have to be significant.
This also has significant public health implications. The “more bikes than cars sold every year” statistic means there are a lot of underused bikes. The usual conversion to regular riding starts with very infrequent riding. Making the first step of that process “visit the government, do paperwork and pay money” would be a significant disincentive (to use bureaucratic-speak). It would be like the helmet process, but more so. At least bike shops are open long hours, especially weekends, and will take cash from anyone without requiring ID and queuing. The local government vehicle registration office? 8-12 on Saturdays if you’re lucky, with an hour or more queue.
Having worked in a bike shop and as a volunteer bike recycler/bike mechanic there are a lot of cyclists who struggle to buy a new tyre or tube for their bike ($30/$7), and will walk or fare-evade to work if their bike breaks down. At the extreme, the “bikes for refugees” prgram works with people who get 89% of the dole[1], and are legally forbidden to supplement that income (other than possibly by begging). Giving someone like that a free bike is relatively easy (“free” means the donors pay typically less than $10 per bike), but adding a registration fee to that would likely cripple the program.
The people are also, of course, at most risk of enforcement action, and most likely to suffer the high end of whatever punishments are available.
[1] the dole is accepted as being well below the poverty line AFAIK, so 89% of it is just sadism.
The helmet law controversy is an interesting one. As someone who used to ride motorbikes and has come over the handle bars and has several friends who have had bike accidents they are feeling still decades later, I feel this ‘right to wear no protection and be fixed up if possible on the public expense’ is a bit of a crazy length to take libertarianism and protests against the state. Fascinatingly motorbike riders are increasingly wearing incredible layers of amour protection while the inner city youth seem to favour no protection whatever (including shoes or gloves.) presumably based on them feeling immortal.
But like say fluoridation it looks like a no common agreement situation. Especially as risk taking by some seems to be part of the spice of life in this increasingly crowded world.
A different interesting problem is whether or not to impose more severe lifetime penalties. This would probably be workable were it not for the fact that town planning has made our mobility so dependent on cars that too often there is no affordable alternative. Long term sanctions could work in the inner cities I think but in the suburbs and bush it will make mobility near impossible unless you have a bottomless wallet to afford taxis (comments on the economics of different transport welcome).
The point with helmets is, per Chris Rissel et al, that the health benefit from cycling outweighs the health cost of permitting non-helmetted riding. It’s an argument about marginal benefit, not absolute benefit. Interestingly, car occupant helmets would save even more lives than bike helmets but that proposal has never been taken seriously because it would be inconvenient… see above about who rides a bicycle.
There are a number of places where helmet use makes little to no sense, and the “town bikes” are one obvious example. Renting out bicycles is fairly simple to set up, but when helmets have to be provided as well you’re adding significant complexity. They are fragile, damage can be hard to detect, and they need to be cleaned. The Melbourne solution is to sell subsidised helmets, because an exemption would make it too obvious that MHL’s are a sick joke.
You can’t force people with bad records off the road. You can only take away their licence. There are a lot of unlicensed drivers on the roads. The kind of person who is aggressive on the road is exactly the kind of person who will keep on driving if they lose their licence.
Suspend their car rego while they are unlicensed? They will drive an unregistered car. Take away their car? They will drive another car.
Throw them in jail for driving unlicensed? You could do that, in the same way that if you make the penalty harsh enough you can deter most things. But this would be a very authoritarian as well as expensive solution. And it’s not like the road toll is spiralling out of control. In fact it’s been declining for decades, through the introduction of compulsory seat belts, random breath testing, safer cars and better roads.
@Newtownian
The problem of car dependence is huge, and would likely create an even more substantial social pressure against the law than the one against speed restrictions.
A better solution, IMO, would be to increase the penalties and require people to obtain a new licence if they lose it, rather than just paying a fee. Having to go through driver training and testing would be more effective than any level of fine, because fines are not indexed to wealth. Imagine Nationals MP Vince Catania (WA, 2011) having to go down and join the local schoolkids at driver ed after his disqualification period ended. That would be justifiable IMO since he clearly doesn’t know how to drive.
This should also apply automatically to anyone who uses incompetance as an excuse after a crash. It’s disturbingly common and annoys me a lot. After killing someone the at-fault driver will say “I didn’t know what to do” or “I didn’t see them” (both of which are law-breaking actions) but those statements will be treated as mitigating factors. Ditto medical certificates saying “prone to sneezing fits” or whatever. Sure, accepted, but you can’t drive again until that problem is solved.
Alan Davies (The Urbanist, Crikey blog) has written on this topic a few times “s it time bicycles were registered?”
With regard to aggressive driving, improved technology could be used to address it. The increasing ability of machines to interpret visual data could be used to capture a lot more road offences. This means we may actually have to increase the number of points people have on their licences, as if we ever got to a point where all offences were detected I think very few people would retain their licences under the current system. It would also be possible to require people convicted of serious driving offences to have a “black box” in any vehicle they drive that would basically teach them to drive safely. A modern mobile phone could potentially serve this function.
And then there is the fact that high end cars are getting increasing amounts of surveillance equipment built into them to increase safety, all the way up to self driving cars that are now being tested in various places around the world. I think it is likely that a considerable number of people with this technology in their cars would want to use it to punish dangerous drivers they see on the roads and would be more than happy to have their technology used to gather evidence against them.
@Ronald Brak
While I share the sentiments expressed by PrQ above, I continue to linger on the prevention is better than cure side of the line, and rather more I suspect than our host. To use another common metpahor, I like the fence at the top of the cliff better than the ambulance below, while agreeing that both are going to be needed.
As I’ve said a number of times here, I’d say that every motor vehicle should have a transponder in it, and some sort of biometric log in so that every driver — just to start the vehicle would have to authenticate. Vehicles that exceeded the speed limit (or looked as if they were about to do so, could be warned and then fined on the spot if they breached and didn’t immediately desist . Those that avoided warnings over a significant period of time/distance driven could be rewarded with various kinds of tangible and intangible benefits. Those that were doing the wrong thing would be caught and DQ’d much earlier.
I’d also have cameras in vehicles so that evidence of driver misconduct/inattention (one’s own or that of others) could be collected. I’d also have passive breath test analysis in vehicles which, when a certain level was detected would prompt the driver to bring the vehicle to a safe stop within 30 seconds and do a PCA test or start a phased shut down of the vehicle’s fuel/energy system. Once that had occurred, the vehicle would not restart within 2 hours and only after a clean PCA test.
One of the key reasons for ignoring rules is the suspecion that you won’t be caught. That’s far more salient for most than the size of the apparent penalty.
It seems to me that we could keep the points system we have now in that paradigm — although I agree that anyone guilty of the higher range offences (e.g. more than 30km/h over speed limit, fail to stop at stop sign, cross unbroken separation line etc) who committed three of these offences in three years could have their points reduced. I’d also relate the cost of road usage in part to compliance — so those with a clean scoresheet would pay less per km than those without a clean sheet, and less still than those who had six points or more against them.
I also believe a lot more needs to be done to get people out of cars and into mass transport. We could do a lot better with car pooling too.
As to bikes, I remain very much in favour of physical separation from other traffic on main connecting roads adnd in favour of compulsory helmets. I have an open mind on how we force compliance with the latter.
Someone who has gone through all those steps is dangerous enough to be at high risk of killing or injuring someone else, either on or off the road. So, yes, imprisonment looks like a pretty sensible response to continued aggressive and dangerous lawbreaking.
As for the view that only 1000 or so fatalities a year is doing fine, I don’t know how to respond. The same claim could have been made in the mid-80s before RBT. Death rates were way below their peak then, and would have continued falling.
I’d like to see dash cams and helmet cams made compulsory. With laws allowing these as evidence against d*ckhead drivers caught on camera.
@John Quiggin
1000 fatalities is not “fine”, but it’s a lot better than it used to be, particularly on a per kilometre driven basis, and it’s still on a downward trend. Fatalities were 30 per 100000 of population in 1970 (the peak) and are about 7 today.
“imprisonment looks like a pretty sensible response to continued aggressive and dangerous lawbreaking.”
Unless you lock them away for life because they represent a permanent danger to the community, like child molesters who are kept in prison even after they have completed their sentence, this still won’t solve the problem. And these are people who in most cases will not have actually hurt anybody, just potentially so because of their driving.
I think cyclists should carry a 9mm Glock so that after encounters with disrespectful motorists they can (to quote John Cleese) fire a warning shot between the eyes.
If the playing field was level in terms of kinetic energy cars and bicycles should be nowhere near each other. Think of an 80 kg rider on a 10 kg bike doing 15 kph vs a 1350 kg car travelling 60 kph, over 200X more k.e.. Despite the enduring popularity of clunky SUVs some car makers want to ‘lightweight’ using aluminum panels and electric transmission. Those cars could get squashed like an ant in a collision with a semitrailer. Therefore we’ll need new road rules to cover many new developments.
@Hermit
That thought has also occurred to me.
@Uncle Milton
Exploring a bit further, how would you deal with other habitual dangerous criminals where no one has yet been physically harmed eg a burglar who repeatedly breaks into houses when people are likely to be there, ignores supervision orders, refuses community service, removes monitoring bracelets etc? Or do you see your potentially lethal motorist as being in a different category?
Bicycle registration has proved unworkable or expensive in most countries and the trend has been to drop the laws.
The only country I know of that still has bike registration is Japan, but the situation in that country is completely different: real estate is at such a premium that owners of tiny apartments are likely to dump or park their old bikes on the narrow, busy pavements. Police do multiple sweeps each day and unregistered bikes are sent to the scrapyard.
@cbp
It’s important to differentiate between the Japanese/Swiss etc schemes where cycles pay a token fee and get a sticker, from the motor vehicle style “must have a number plate” registration. I’ve heard very few motorists advocate for the former, and almost never a cyclist for the latter (and those few usually amend their view when informed of any of the counter-arguments).
The funding argument is interesting. There are roughly 20M bicycles in Australia, of which perhaps 0.1M are ridden at least weekly. Or 1.3M bicycles sold every year at an average of under $500. So if we charged $100/year for bicycle registration (on a par with the admin costs for car rego) plus $50 for a number plate, we’d get about $10M annually plus $5M the first year. My guess is that very few of the “less than once a week” cyclists would register at that price. Or we could add, say, 2.5% to the cost of every new bicycle and get $10M a year that way (I assume a drop in sales). By comparison, there are 10M motorists in Australia paying well over a billion dollars just for registration. So adding $10M to that barely makes a difference, and a $1/year variation in what motorists pay would wipe it out.
Fran, installing a black box in every vehicle would certainly cut road accidents. However, I doubt that legislation requiring they be universally installed would get passed, at least not in the near future. It may be easier to start with only requiring them for new cars or for learner and probationary drivers and those with serious traffic offences, with money off car registration costs for leaving the system installed and operational. Then when enough people are comfortable with being monitored by black boxes and see them as a useful safety system instead of device that will suddenly take control of their car and drive them to a concentration camp, then it would be easier to require them in all cars. Of course, by that point we may be able to get rid of human drivers altogether, or at least have them closely moitored by machines so that driving becomes like a small child using one of those toy steering wheels that lets them pretend they are driving.
And opportunity cost comes into it. Spending money on creating a new organisation to take over functions currently not being performed by the Anti-Commonwealth Serum Laboratory may be a better use of funds and save more lives per dollar spent, but I think we can probably take that as a given in these sorts of conversations.
Well John,
With regard to “… reduce the current 60/50 speed limits in urban areas to 50/40 … The welfare cost … would, in my view, be trivial…”, I would hope that the analysis in your professional work is a bit more thought through. (Or is this the indulgence of a well paid academic with flexible hours and a residence near work).
The proposed 20% reduction in speeds (I know that people don’t spend the whole trip at peak speed, but slower peaks typically means more intersection delays) would translate into a 25% increase in trip times.
Just off the top of my head that means:
(a) at any given time, 25% more vehicles would be occupying the same road surface, dramatically increasing traffic congestion and driver stress levels.
(b) a 25% increase in car generated pollution (including carbon).
(c) assuming a 40 minute trip to/from work (not atypical for people living in outer suburbs of Sydney), this is an extra 20 minute of each person’s life wasted every day. Assuming 1 million working commuters, that represents 38 man years squandered each day or 1 life wasted every 2 days (so the equivalent of 180 fatalities each year).
Those are the immediately apparent costs, which frankly don’t strike me as trivial at all. Maybe we have a different definition of trivial.
This isn’t even mentioning the contribution of the drivers (through registration fees) to road construction and maintenance (raising the question of exactly for whose “convenience” are these utility costs being imposed).
SamB
Sam B, your calculations are way off the mark.
1. Where congestion is a problem, speed limits aren’t binding.
2. Fuel use for a given distance increases with speed, it doesn’t decrease
3. Your calculations assume a 40 minute commute entirely on suburban streets now subject to a 50 k limit. That’s silly. In context, it ought to be clear that the 60k limit similarly refers to sub-arterial roads, not to the motorways typically used for long distance commutes. I’ll edit the post to make this clear
@John Quiggin
The unfortunate reality is that a lot of drivers who end up on the downward spiral don’t have “aggressive” offences in their traffic history. In fact, hardly anybody does – ‘exceed speed limit 40+ kph’ can mean anything (of course doing so is highly likely to be dangerous and that is why it’s in the most serious class of offence).
I’d encourage everybody to spend a few hours one morning in their local Magistrates Court (or ‘Local Court’) and witness for themselves the range of charges and circumstances that come up in the real world daily.
You will see desperate people who are charged with unlicensed driving but, at least in their mind, had no alternative. If they keep doing it they end up in jail – almost invariably after being told that would be the consequence of a further breach.
I once saw a guy screech to a halt outside the Brisbane Magistrates Court, leave the keys in the ignition and the windows down, didn’t feed the meter and raced into court where he faced driving charges. I later found out that the car was stolen.
Free public transport would solve a lot of problems.
I pay an annual registration fee to use the roads. Some of the time I’m in a car, and some of the time I’m on a bike, and some of the time I’m a pedestrian.
In the very short term I favour harsher penalties for people who can’t drive properly.
But I’d prefer that people who aren’t able to drive properly be forced to have their cars fitted with collision avoidance and speed limiting devices.
We are only a short step away from self driving cars, and in 30 years young people will look back in horror, finding it hard to comprehend that we allowed people to control cars.
My Dad, aged about 80, had an accident that was his fault, and spent close to 6 months in hospital and various stages of rehabilitation. A car that drove itself would not have had that accident. The health system savings from accident reductions would be enormous.
Indeed, driverless cars will be the public transport of the future. You’ll call one on the internet, and it will come to you, and after its dropped you off, it will move onto its next job. No more looking for parking spots.
The only way to go is physical separation for bikes as standard. It should be required in all new developments, as well as good, safe access to the front of the shopping centres and other facilities (front, as opposed to, the edge of the carpark; not necessarily the main entrance).
A first step would need to be making it possible to safely do right turns into a road that terminates on the multi-lane road you’re on. You can do a hook turn at a four-way, but at a three-way the only (safe, legal) option in most cases is to get off the bike, cross as a pedestrian twice, and get on the bike again. But I’m not even convinced that is safe much of the time, because where are you supposed to stop and dismount when there’s cars and trucks thundering past close by on your left?
I’ve always thought that as part of getting a license, people should be taught a few road skills beyond the rules. A day doing some driving in difficult and changing conditions, night driving, etc, under supervision, would be very helpful in getting (inexperienced) people understand through experience what happens if the road becomes slick with rain, oil, etc; what to do if braking becomes a skid; what it really means to be travelling at 40, 60, 80kph and then to stop as rapidly as possible (ie how far do you really go before coming to a halt at different speeds), etc.
Today I saw the oh so common situation of a P-plater roaring through a round-about, gunning the motor, only to brake quickly upon coming up the rear of a group of cars doing the speed limit; said P-plater then stuck right up the exhaust pipe of the last car in the group, effectively intimidating that driver into trying to speed up—with nowhere to go. If any of the cars ahead had hit the skids for any reason, the P-plater had only 2 to 3 metres between his car and the one ahead. Anyone driving like that should be dealt with rather brusquely, surely.
@John Quiggin
I am not in favour of locking up anybody on a pre-emptive basis. You should punish people for what they have done, not what they might do.
Uncle Milton, I think if someone was locked up because they drove without a licence, refused community service orders, and removed home detention ankle bracelets, they would be locked up for something they had done, namely driving without a licence, refusing community service orders, and removing home detention ankle bracelets, rather than something they might do.
@Felix Alexander
As a cyclist, I can’t go for physical separation of bikes from cars. Roads are great, they get you where you want to go quickly. They are almost always better quality than cycle paths. And where bikes and cars are separated by a bit of curbing, it becomes really dangerous, as a bike may clip the curbing and fall into the path of the car.
I much prefer a marked cycle lane on the road. As long as cyclists are in the lane, cars can safely overtake. Any form of barrier is just an accident waiting to happen.
@Ronald Brak
Sure, but they are not going to be locked up for long. It’s not like they have committed mass murder. The effect on the road toll will be next to zero. If you want to stop dangerous people from driving, the solution has to to be a technology that stops the car’s ignition when they are at the wheel. That way, all you at doing is stopping them from driving, which is what you are aiming to do.
While I don’t think I agree with the idea of bicycle registration, I certainly think that a concerted effort needs to be made in education and enforcement of road rules for cyclists would be a good idea. When I started cycling it took me a fair bit of effort to find out the relevant laws for how I was to behave, and there are clearly a large number of people who either don’t know or don’t care about them.
The number of times while walking and have been nearly hit by a cyclist riding on the footpath, running red lights, or overtaking stopped trams is concerning, and police do absolutely nothing about it. But it is hard to punish people for not obeying the laws when it is difficult to actually find out what those laws are.
@Uncle Milton
That’s a better option if feasible.
Uncle Milton, the first time you beat up a granny you don’t go to jail for long either but keep it up and by the time they let you out they’ll only be robot cars on the streets. (Note this only applies if you keep your opponent’s injuries minor, but I find I can often defeat a woman in her eighties with her only suffering bruises if I remember to keep my left up and my thighs close together.)
@John Quiggin
1. My point was that increasing the amount of time cars spend on the road (given a fixed amount of road surface) would in itself create congestion where none previously existed.
2. That assumes that people drive at a steady (lower) speed, not that they are constantly accelerating and decelerating to adjust to varying speeds – or to stop, idle, and start at each intersection. (Slower speeds mean that less cars get through each intersection each time lights change, and so more starts and stops.)
3. Before passing judgement on how people commute, perhaps you should try getting into a car and commuting somewhere other than in St Lucia. In Sydney for example, both Victoria Rd and Paramatta Rd and major routes for traffic flow – neither is a “motorway”.
Now if there was a credible public transport system (or were talking about building one) we could have a different discussion. As it is though, is your proposal is essentially that the broader community should subsidize the people who are young/healthy/fit/balanced enough to ride a bike over long distances. A more select small, privileged segment is hard to come up with.
@Sam B
that was meant to be “are major routes” rather than “and major routes “
@John Brookes
As a person who rides a bike (I’ll probably borrow a car so I can get to the parents’ place in the country for Christmas), I know that it’s people who are in cars because it’s too bloody dangerous to ride are the people who we need to get out of their cars and onto their bikes. If you want to go down the road at whatever speed you like, by all means, do so.
And I simply have no idea how you’re planning on falling over the division between cars and bikes into the car’s path. There’s probably parked cars or trees or something in the way, and the main road for bikes probably only gets a few cars at 40 or 50 k because it’s not the main road for cars cos it’s optimised for safety not speed.
As for me, however fast I ride when I’m riding for leisure, there’s two or three ways I could get to work. Only one of them has a bike lane—and I avoid it like the plague. It’s too loud it’s too smelly it’s too stressful it’s too hectic and I don’t see how a white line keeps me safe from cars doing 80 km/h where they almost never see a bike and want to turn left into this or that side street.
@Sam B
1. This doesn’t work. If the traffic can’t move at 50 k, it can’t move at 60k either
2. This makes your case even worse. The higher the maximum speed, the greater the energy used in accelerating to top speed then braking to a stop
3. Do you claim these are sub-arterial roads? If not, what is your point?
Very good discussion here.
As far as elderly drivers, I think most people could rattle off a few names of their elderly family and friends they think shouldn’t be driving. I certainly can.
Someone mentioned about doctors keeping the elderly in their routine, well I can tell you that’s been my experience. My gut instinct is that something should be done, but I’ll go with the evidence. If the evidence is mixed I don’t see it as a big drama trailing a system for a period. Give it 6 years and see what the feeling is like in the community, what the data shows etc.
Essentially the topic, once you think about it, is really about the safety and efficiency of urban transport systems as a whole. Sure we can think about getting the elderly off the road. But if we simply got more of anyone off the road and on their bikes, on the train etc. than that would probably result in a similar safety improvement from a whole-of-system perspective.
Things that haven’t been mentioned re: bikes
1) connecting off-road cycle paths so they can be used to actually get somewhere
2) removing ‘street clutter’ from cycle paths – yellow ‘banana bars’, other dividers etc.
3) improved standard road designs that provide adequate parking, cycling, merging etc space. The Dutch have been testing these designs for decades, we can just borrow their latest and greatest. I do know there are good people in the Qld government pushing for this, but it’s like steering the Titanic with a paddle-pop stick.
4) Tougher driving licence requirements (already happening)
5) More heavily subsidised public transport (I’ve never understood the rationale behind raising revenues from fares rather than say, land taxes)
6) no helmet law
Perhaps by then the “beam me up Scotty” device will have been invented.
And this morning, walking along the footpath through the CBD, I watched at three separate intersections, the crazy drivers who pile into the intersection, just hoping the traffic ahead is going to clear before the lights go red—then get stranded across the intersection, thus blocking an entire major road’s worth of traffic for another entire cycle of the lights. Funnily enough, this then provokes the next set of drivers to pile into the intersection and to hope that those ahead will get moving before the lights change on them…
Idiots. Anyone can get caught out on a rare occasion; however, basic polite driving (and safe driving, and legal driving, etc) would suggest that if you are stopped before an intersection, and the road on the other side is jam packed full of cars, you wait until there is an adequate gap for you to drive up into: it isn’t as if anyone can cut in front and steal a gap that suddenly appears, is it?
@Donald Oats
Not so. Sitting at the corner of Rawson St and Carlingford Rd Epping in the peak you see a lot of people take the gap you leave.
I agree it’s stupid and discourteous. Again though, this is where in-vehicle cameras and a suitable app could really help. People won’t do bad things nearly as often if they feel they are going to be held accountable.
@Fran Barlow
True, but I’m talking about traffic going from stationary at the lights, to straight into an intersection that is blocked with stationary traffic on the opposite side. If there is no gap on the other side of the intersection when you decide to enter the intersection, driving straight ahead, then you are assuming that a gap will appear only through the traffic ahead starting to move forwards from a stationary position. I guess I wasn’t too clear about that. Maybe this driving into the intersection, stopping and waiting for the traffic ahead to start moving, is an Adelaide phenomenon, but my impression is that it is on the increase during peak hour periods. The last case I saw this morning was an articulated bus blocking virtually every lane across the intersection for the whole light cycle. Good way to end up with a case of road rage.
Regarding helmets – the same arguments apply to motor vehicle occupants as apply to cyclists, viz.: helmets save lives and head injuries. You don’t see motor racing drivers without a helmet, for good reason.
I have no doubt that wearing a (then non-compulsory) helmet saved my life in a bad bicycle bingle in 1985, and I have never been out cycling without one since. I cycle every working day. However, the major safety risk to helmet-wearing me comes from careless and agressive drivers for whom my life is a far lesser concern than the minor inconvenience involved in safe overtaking. This will only be remedied, as numerous examples around the world have shown, when bicycles form a significant part of normal traffic flows. Anything that hinders this development, such as compulsory helmet laws, prolongs and exacerbates the danger faced by all cyclists.
If however the coercive powers of the state are going to be deployed against non-helmet wearing cyclists, they should also be deployed against non-helmet wearing motor vehicle occupants and for the same reason. Of course, this is not going to happen, for the rubbish reason that motor vehicle drivers and passengers are addicted to convenience and care little about safety except where it does not inconvenience them. A
nother major safety improvement for motor vehicles that is not going to happen, for the same reason, would be to replace lap-sash seat belts with full racing harness seat belts.
Motorists who are keen for cyclists to be forced to wear helmets should admit that safety does not occupy poll position among their reasons.
@Donald Oats
Oh yes, I know what you’re saying but I’ve seen people break from the lane next to me (or from the cross street) and fill the space. Once a handful of people start that contest, all you get is gridlock and then people fancy that they might as well join in an iteration of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
no one is paying attention to the fact there are two categories of bike riders.
category 1)
people who use their bike to get around,go shopping etc, who have a basket on the front and a rack on the back.
they go pretty slow and generally avoid riding in traffic,so bike paths and foot paths are the go, which means interaction with other users and saying hullo to pram pushers, gophers, joggers, walkers etc.
the vibe is quite cheery.
the bikes are generally not expensive and the lack of licence fees,parking fees,petrol and other running costs and the cost of licences are zero is a big point in favour.
2)
the lancearmstrongarrogantupmarketlogolycraillmanneredcorporatespeedfreakingidividualandpackridingmenaces
(i say,steady on ,that’s a bit harsh.(sorry))
ahem.
the ones who ride in traffic and sometimes also do it for sport.
going slow and being out of reach of traffic means if you can off,at worst you get a bruise and pick up the shopping that has spilled all over the place and then get back on,swearing.
riding in traffic means if you are collected by any of your fellow road users you are either seriously crunched or dead meat and wearing a helmet is nothing but a fashion accessory.
the use
I remember in some sci-fi book someone being aghast about manual driving on a public road. I look forward to robotic cars. The road system of our age will be looked back on like open sewers.
In the meantime, I’d like to see a tougher stance taken on aggressive or foolhardy driving. It would be very easy to require anyone who is convicted of a driving offence or accumulates a chunk of points to have an online tracking device in their car. It would also be possible to have graded sanctions, selectively ban them from driving, say on one day per week, or after curfew time. This has an incentive effect that could produce self-monitoring without the big bang of total loss of mobility or unemployment.
@may
Plenty of cyclists fall in both categories, may.
The “arrogant” stuff about lycra wearers is mostly just irrational prejudice. There’s always the occasional dickhead, but that is just as true of “slow” riders, pedestrians and motorists as it is of the lycra brigade.
In my experience. the lycra brigade are generally more conscious of safety, road and path rules and signalling than non-lycra cyclists. As a bicycle commuter who rides predominantly on a dual-use path rather than the road, I find the biggest hazard is cyclists who don’t use lights, signal, wear visible clothing or stop at intersections. Often these are not lycra-wearers.
For the record, I’m yet to meet or hear of a discourteous cyclist from within my circle of acquaintances. I often walk dogs around dusk and the bikes can startle the dogs if they come up quickly behind us but there’s never been a problem.
FTR, I think in-vehicle cameras and compulsory gps tracking sound pretty dystopian.
Also, as a non-lycra wearing cyclist, I completely agree with May’s assessment of the distinction between the two subtypes. Lycra people are very particular about rigidly adhering to rules for the sake of rules, but show no actual courtesy towards other road users, or any interest in genuinely contributing to road safety.