Road Safety

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (14:57): My question is to the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure. Can the minister outline roadwork programs being undertaken to improve community safety at rural intersections?

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, Minister for Housing and Urban Development) (14:58): I thank the member for Kaurna for his question and his interest in road safety. In South Australia, we have made great progress in reducing the number of fatal and serious injury crashes on our roads in recent years. In 2016, South Australia recorded its lowest ever road toll, with 86 fatalities. However, of course, there is always more work to be done.

Our Road Safety Strategy 2020: Towards Zero Together, aims to reduce our annual road toll to less than 80 fatalities and 800 serious injuries per annum by 2020, with a vision of zero, as no death or serious injury on our roads is ever acceptable or inevitable. Each year, the majority of fatal crashes occur outside the Adelaide metropolitan area. Crash data from 2016 identified that 16 per cent of fatal crashes in rural areas were at intersections, compared with only 13 per cent in the year before.

In response, the government is continuing to improve the safety of rural intersections with traditional infrastructure safety upgrades and redesigns. Multimillion-dollar intersection upgrades have been completed over the last 12 months at rural intersections including in the Barossa Valley, the Springton Road junction with Mount Crawford and Warren roads; at Humbug Scrub; Hindmarsh Valley; at Port Pirie; Woodside; Yorke Peninsula and Redhill.

In February this year, I announced more than $3.2 million of investment to improve safety on country roads in the Mid North, including around Auburn, Spalding, Jamestown, Hallett and the Barossa Valley. I am pleased to advise the house that in addition to these more traditional types of infrastructure upgrades at intersections, we will be trialling an Australian first high-tech transport innovation at three inner rural intersections later this year. State-of-the-art technology will be installed which triggers safety measures when vehicles are detected approaching each intersection from conflicting directions.

The rural intersection active warning system is able to reduce the speed limit for vehicle approaches at an intersection when it detects vehicles simultaneously approaching that intersection from different directions. This innovative technology, originally developed in Sweden, is currently in use in New Zealand where it has delivered safety benefits and recorded vehicle speed reductions and hence a reduction in the risk of accidents at rural intersections by as much as 20 km/h when a risk between two or more approaching vehicles is identified.

One of the first locations in South Australia to receive the technology will be a T-junction at the intersection of Bakers Gully Road and McLaren Flat Road in Kangarilla where, sadly, a fatal crash occurred in 2015. The other two intersections where the technology will be trialled later this year are Fox Creek Road and Cudlee Creek Road at Cudlee Creek and Paris Creek Road and Bull Creek Road at Paris Creek. Our state government is continually investing to keep improving South Australia's arterial road network with this sort of technology and others, called intelligent transport systems.

We have not only placed these sorts of technology developments at the forefront of our agenda as a transport agency in the state government but we have also encouraged the adoption of these nationally, and later this week I will be attending the national transport ministers council where we will be considering how to more rapidly accelerate the adoption of these technologies not just on our road network but in vehicles across Australia.