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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2015-06-18 Daily Xml
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Speed Limits

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (11:57): I move:

That this house—

(a) opposes mandatory maximum speed limit reductions on country roads when there is no safety-based evidence to support the change;

(b) calls on the state government to—

(i) make public its review into maximum speed limits on regional roads in South Australia;

(ii) undertake a comprehensive safety audit of all country roads where the speed limit has been reduced from 110 km/h to 100 km/h in the past four years and, where there is no evidence to support improved road safety outcomes, immediately change the speed limit back;

(iii) commit funding to upgrade regional council and arterial roads currently posted at 110 km/h rather than further reduce speed limits; and

(iv) prioritise regional road maintenance when addressing the $400 million road maintenance backlog.

I note, after moving the motion, that the backlog is probably at least $1 billion at the moment. In 2013, the South Australian government made the announcement to review around 200 regional roads. The purpose of the review was to see if there was a need to reduce the speed limit from 110 km/h to 100 km/h. Before this review, many roads within 100 kilometres of Adelaide had already had their speed limits reduced, and many of these roads were in my electorate of Hammond, the seat of Goyder and also many other surrounding electorates.

This is not a decision you can be uncertain about, considering that it is people's lives we are talking about. Something I do not think the state government understands is that it is not the people who are travelling at 110 km/h and doing the right thing who are the issue: it is those who are under the influence of drugs and alcohol or those who drive in a dangerous manner. That is what the government should be targeting and punishing, not law-abiding road users.

Another point I would like to touch on again from when I last spoke on the issue is the choice of some roads that are to be reduced, according to the government, to 100 km/h. I find it very interesting that it has identified certain roads for restrictions when they have had no deaths, no serious injuries and no minor injuries on them in the past five years. This goes to show that the state government has not really done its homework when investigating unsafe roads.

The government advise that they are making regional roads safer, but if you do the math on deducting 10 kilometres, you will find that the government's plan to make roads safer could possibly have the opposite effect. An example of this is the following: people in country areas will be forced to travel longer periods of time, whether it be to get to work, to go home, to shop, to do business, or to visit friends and family. These reductions will keep people on our roads for longer and will result in frustration and fatigue.

If I go into a more in-depth example: a 20-kilometre trip to work (which is quite common in the country) would normally take 11 minutes at 110 km/h. At 100 km/h, the same trip would take 12 minutes. If that is extrapolated across only 5,000 people in the state, it means that country residents are on the road for a combined 83 hours extra per day across the state: 83 hours where fatigue from a hard day's work can set in; 83 hours where a drunk driver has the opportunity to swerve into oncoming traffic; 83 hours where someone high on drugs has the opportunity to total their vehicle and possibly take innocent lives with them. If you want to take this even further, if a family takes a holiday to the city and has to drive 300 kilometres to Adelaide along country roads, then that trip will take an extra 15 minutes.

Moving on, I would like to speak about the recent transfer which Viterra made with their preferred form of transport, especially on the Mallee lines. Prior to the change, Viterra were carting grain via both Mallee rail lines; however, as of 1 August, they will be transporting grain on the Mallee and Karoonda highways. This will have a huge increase on the current traffic flow on these highways.

In my previous speech on this issue, I advised the government that if Viterra were to make this change, these highways would need significant upgrades. Viterra will not use Mallee rail lines from August. This now requires the state Labor government to implement further development and construction on the Mallee and Karoonda highways. This includes shoulder sealing work and overtaking lanes, which are desperately needed each way on both highways to make them safe, with the extra road freight that will come about because of this decision by Viterra.

I believe the government should make use of fixing these roads instead of trying to fix the issue with reducing the speed limit by 10 km/h. They have taken the easy option, but I cannot stress enough that this option is simply nothing other than a short-term fix. The Liberal Party fully supports any measure to make our roads safer, but we do not support measures that target the wrong people in the wrong areas. As I have stated before, this reduction will not serve its purpose, which is to reduce the road toll on our country roads. This is because the Labor government do not understand how regional South Australia works.

A report that was provided by the Murray Bridge council states that failing to look and give way to oncoming traffic, and careless or reckless driving, are the biggest contributors to road accidents, not the speed. I would like to remind the government that speed does not make a country road unsafe, considering you have road trains travelling at 130 km/h on certain roads in the Northern Territory. You make roads safer by keeping them maintained, not by letting them fall apart and dropping the speed limit, hoping the road toll will reduce.

I just note the recent online survey that the government did, and it was quite biased in its questioning in trying to mandate whether it was just a simple budgetary measure of paying a few million dollars—I think it was $3 million or $4 million just to put out a few signposts out rated at 100 km/h instead of the current 110 on these 200 roads throughout the state—compared to what was potentially a $9 billion upgrade bill.

That just goes to show where the government are focusing their idea with regard to regional roads. They do not want to tackle the issue, they want to make it an easy issue to supposedly fix just by dropping the speed limit. Regional people will not put up with that. Regional people want their roads maintained. They want to be able to move around the state at a reasonable and safe speed to get to where they need to be, and they do not need the easy option. I will certainly be interested if the results of that survey ever see the light of day.

I believe that this reduction in speed limits is unnecessary, and that the government needs to rethink their intentions. I 100 per cent believe that reducing the speed limit will not result in the government's desired outcome. I commend the motion.

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (12:04): I very strongly support the member for Hammond's motion. I will not read out all of it, but the intent of the motion is made very clear in paragraph (a):

(a) opposes mandatory maximum speed limit reductions on country roads when there is no safety-based evidence to support the change;

We on this side—and I know members on the other side—support road safety. We want fewer serious accidents and fewer deaths on our state's roads, whether they be city or country roads, but the government is not going about it the right way. To just have blanket reductions across gigantic swathes of regional South Australia is not the way to address this very serious problem.

The police have told us for several years now (and they are right) that there are five key issues that contribute to serious issues and fatalities on our roads: fatigue; not wearing seatbelts; drugs and alcohol; inattention; and the fifth one is speeding.

The Hon. T.R. Kenyon: Speed, not speeding.

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN: Speeding, not speed limits, speeding—breaking the speed limit. That is the key issue that really has been missed here.

I could nominate roads where I think there is a good case to be made to reduce the speed limit in my electorate, and I could nominate roads where I think there is a case to increase the speed limit in my electorate. That is the way to go about it, not just to have a blanket ban, not just to say that we are looking at this whole big chunk of geography and we are going to reduce all the speed limits there.

The last time the government actually put out a list of the roads on which they were considering reducing the speed limit, when I went through that list the vast majority of those roads had not had a serious accident or fatality on them in the previous five years. That is a vexed issue, I accept that. You do not want to wait for a tragedy to implement the solution, but you also do not want to penalise people with over-restrictive solutions in situations where those tragedies may or may not happen.

This is an area of extremely serious personal responsibility. Whether a person is driving themselves in their own car, driving their family or driving on certain roads today, or driving a quad road train, the person in charge of the vehicle has to take that responsibility extremely seriously. Just blanket reductions on speed limits will not be the thing that does that. It is the people who are already behaving irresponsibly by falling foul of any of those five things I have just listed, especially the people who are already behaving irresponsibly by driving in excess of the speed limit, we have to address—they are the ones whose behaviours we have to change.

But the people who are already driving at 110 km/h, or just below, who would now, if the speed limits were reduced, have to drive at 100 km/h or just below, are not the at-risk people, especially if they are not falling foul of the other four key issues that contribute to problems in this area. So, I oppose the blanket ban. It would not matter if it were a blanket reduction in a metropolitan or country area: you have to have a good positive reason to do it.

I went to a forum in Peterborough on this topic, arranged by the Minister for Road Safety, and it was very positive. There were probably about 15 of us as members of the public, including myself, mayors, councillors and other local people who came along. The departmental people who came and presented to us did a good job, and I appreciated them sharing that information with us. Probably the most important information they shared with us was when the minister said that there is proof that, where the speed limits have been reduced, road safety has improved. That is very important, but let us delve into that a little bit deeper.

On the specific roads where the speed limits have been reduced, where there has been improvement in road safety on those roads, yes, I would support maintaining the reduction under two other criteria, and I will come to those in a minute. The roads that have had their speeds reduced, where there has been no discernible improvement in road safety those roads should have their limits returned to what they were before.

I also clearly say that it is important to interrogate this road safety data in a bit of detail. It is not good enough to say, 'Here is a stretch of road. The speed limit was reduced, and since then we have seen an improvement in road safety, i.e. fewer serious accidents and/or fewer fatalities.' I know that on the roads where the speed limits have been reduced the road traffic volume has also been reduced.

People in country areas are avoiding the roads where the speed limit has been reduced and they are detouring onto the roads where the speed limits have not been reduced. Of course the traffic volume has decreased significantly on the roads where the speed limits have been reduced, so of course it is quite logical that the road safety may have improved as well. In that scenario, we do not know whether the road safety has improved because the speed limit was reduced or because the people are not driving on that road in the same volume as they did before.

Another important aspect to consider is road safety in terms not just of a stretch of road or the number of vehicles on that stretch of road, as I alluded to a minute ago, but also in terms of hours driven on the road. As the member for Hammond said, if the trip is stretched out and people are spending a bit more time on the road, then it really needs to be compared to usage. I can tell the house that there are roads throughout my electorate that people are avoiding now. All that does is push the risks onto the other roads where the speed limits have not been reduced.

If you push the traffic onto the other roads where the speed limit has not been reduced, of course you are going to have more accidents on those roads, and that falls into the government's trap beautifully. All of a sudden, you have less traffic and fewer accidents on the roads where the speed limit has been reduced, and more traffic and more accidents on the roads where the speed limit has not been reduced. Guess what? They will want to reduce the speed limit on those roads as well. So, it is very important to interrogate this data in great detail.

In summary, reducing the speed limit is not addressing the five key issues the police are telling us are the key issues and it is penalising the wrong people. I will finish by saying that where there is a good, strong, cogent case for reducing a speed limit, and it can be proven that it works on a stretch of road, I would support it.

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