Most Australians would be insulted to be called “conservative”, and while some Australian politicians, like John Howard, are conveniently branded as “conservative” just about all of them have a bias towards “progress”. But what happens when so-called “progress” becomes at best merely “change” or at worst “regress”? Name me one politician who is prepared to say “It’s the way the world works – there is nothing we can do about it?”
The immediate prompt for these musings is the reaction of Queensland politicians Peter Beattie and Anna Bligh to the Christmas Road Toll. Beattie suggests increasing road fines, while Bligh is promoting curfews for young drivers and confiscation of cars of repeat drink drivers (amongst other things).
Will these solutions work? Is the problem severe enough to warrant them?
I don’t pretend to have the complete answer, but the facts of the matter are that if you are going to allow intelligent monkeys to hurtle around at any speed in vehicles weighing around a ton, some of them are going to be involved in accidents and die.
If you seriously wanted to fix the problem you would mandate push bikes for everyone, and the death toll would plummet. So would your political popularity. So death and accident are unavoidable. The only issue is how much better we can do, given existing circumstances, and this can only be judged by reference to benchmarks.
The first benchmark is whether the toll of 19 is out of the ordinary judged by previous years. The answer to this appears to be “No”. According to yesterday’s Courier Mail this death toll has been matched or bettered (?) in two out of the previous ten years – 23 in 1996/97 and 19 in 2003/04. What’s more, taking into account population growth, argualy the 1997/98 figure of 18 is the equivalent of 19 today.
The average road toll for the 10 year period covered by the Courier is 13.7, with 5 years under it and 5 over it, and a more or less normal distribution of results, suggesting that this Christmas-New Year holiday period is the statistical status quo.
Another benchmark is how well other states perform on road fatalities. Given the small samples, it’s not that appropriate to deal with just the Christmas-New Year period, but rather the whole of the year, and to be comparable the figures have to be per capita, or even better, per kilometre travelled.
I can’t find the most recent figures on the ABS site, but I can find figures for 2003. Per capita Queensland is exactly on the Australian average of 8.2 per 100,000. Only Victoria (6.7) and the ACT (3.4) have lower rates. It’s a similar story when comparing statistics per registered vehicles. The Australian figures don’t appear to include comparisons per kilometre travelled, but given the size of Queensland one suspects that we might do relatively better on that measure, and Victoria and the ACT much worse.
However, they do have international comparisons based on kilometres travelled, and they are good news for Australians. The OECD average is 1 person killed per 100 million vehicle kms travelled, and Australia, at 0.9 is 10% better, meaning, given Queensland’s exactly average performance, that we do 10% better than the OECD average.
There may be room for some improvement in Queensland’s road safety, but the statistics suggest that it is not much, and that drastic measures certainly aren’t justified. What we need is a politician with the guts to say that this is about as good as it gets.