Australia’s Deadly Transport System

Peter Mackenzie An Open Letter on Australia’s Haphazard Transport System, and Road Deaths and Injuries

This is a deadly system that maims and kills in vast numbers. Speaking to a reception in support of the Australian Automobile Association in March 2006, the Governor-General of Australia, Michael Jeffery said, “ I am staggered that we now suffer nationally, an average of 5 road deaths a day, and….paraplegia, quadriplegia, limb amputation and permanent brain damage – are suffered by more than 20,000 Australians a year. It is a terrible situation, comparable only to the combined annual mortality from smoking and alcohol related diseases.”

IF THE oil crisis really is looming, and the worst fears about the speed of global warming are correct, then the issues in this article will be overtaken by far more catastrophic events.

However in the mean-time, no matter how short a time that turns out to be, Australia continues with a haphazard, inefficient, money-wasting road and private car dominated land transport system. Worse than that, we have a system of so-called ‘competition’ between road and rail, where corporate commercial priorities on modal choice take precedence over so-called “externalities” that include accident, injury and unsafe incident levels and costs, exhaust emission levels and use of expensive imported fuels.

We have heavy freight traffic needlessly sent onto unsuitable local roads, and via interstate corridors and though major cities, with a traffic mix that is unsuitable, unsafe, unsustainable and undesirable. The future looks worse, as there is expected to be a doubling of the road freight task by 2020, which will dangerously combine with an ageing population, and growth in younger road user numbers.

This ideologically under-pinned competition policy driven system over-rides the safety of the Australian public, with devastating consequences in terms of human suffering and financial costs.

The Governor-General continued, noting that the $15 Billion figure for the costs of road deaths for 1996 (I think he meant all trauma, not deaths alone), could be doubled to $30 billion per annum for 2006.

And there is one more staggering figure to keep in mind from the speech. Road trauma has killed more Australians than those the died in battle in WWI & WWII.

For those who don’t know, the Pacific Highway from NSW to Qld, claimed over six hundred lives in a recent decade, including the horrific bus-bus and bus-truck crashes that were the catalyst for the continuing major upgrade. (we almost always have to wait for tragedy to see big changes). By contrast, the Tokyo-Osaka Shinkansen “Bullet trains”, have carried around 4.5 billion passengers since operating began in 1962, without one death of a passenger.

When discussing road safety, it is usually about this stage, if not earlier, that one or more of the “immune” folk proclaim something along the lines of “well roads don’t kill, it’s the people who drive on them….if people just obeyed the rules, drove to the conditions, blah blah blah”, we would be saved all this problem. They seem to be hooked into the ‘fault and blame’ syndrome aka individual deficit syndrome, as though every one who ends up in a road crash was reckless, or perhaps ‘bad drivers, many ‘antisocial’ and deserving of what they got, therefore no change to the system, no preventions are really necessary. Even if we accepted that line, it ignores the children or mum/dad, granny or friend who is in the vehicle, and any of the other 1/3rd of road crash victims who respected road safety expert Dr Michael Henderson noted this many years ago, were just in the wrong place at the wrong time when someone else erred.

This astigmatism in thinking, and the companion belief that through punishment, remonstration and ‘education’, we will make everyone drive safely defies long understood knowledge that we all make driving errors that can potentially result in crashes, and we operate within a road system that contains many hazards and traps for not only the young and inexperienced road user, but for all of us at some time or other.

And it doesn’t require alcohol or speed to be included, though they are major contributing factors to road risk and crashes. And as for the other factors quoted by authorities, firstly fatigue includes about half the driving population on a regular basis, and the one-size-fits-all of inattention can be restated as “being human”. Even those highly trained and vetted radar operators miss screen object and see phantom ones at various times.

The risk situation on roads is actually far worse if we factor in estimates for near-misses and unrecorded crashes. In a quasi-conspiratorial way, governments and their agencies focus on road crash statistics, avoiding the fact that near-miss and risk incident levels are so high that in OH & S/ public health and safety terms, our road system should technically be shut-down!.

All the available evidence concludes that it is just not possible to make what I call conventional roads and road use adequately safe – especially so with our ageing population and even moreso with the mix of more heavy vehicles and young drivers with lifestyles that add to risk-taking and making. (no efforts to force people into truly safe behaviour in any domain have the required effectiveness).

Governor General Michael Jeffery also mentioned that through the National Road Safety Strategy, with improved roads, safer vehicles, better driver behaviour and new technology, there is the potential to save 332 lives each year by 2010.

What he, politicians, government agencies and so many others miss though, is the great need and opportunity to incorporate what I call “The Third Tier” of road safety into their transport policy.

Currently “Tier One” of road safety involves creating safer roads, safer drivers and safer vehicles, while “Tier Two” involves more utilization of public transport (and to a lesser degree, alternative transport such as cycling).

The “Third Tier” of road safety would include a National Strategic Plan being developed to contain and mimimize the overall growth in road freight transport and private motor vehicle use over future decades. I began to put this case forward to Federal Liberal and Labor prior to the 1996 election. (With no success to date, as you can imagine!).

I am not in any way advocating a haphazard approach to where, when and how these changes would be made. On the contrary, any changes would need to be made on a strategic, targeted, corridor/ route, journey or road user specific basis, and/or other safety determined priority basis. We need a Task Force to be created as a matter of great urgency, and this group to develop a draft National Strategic Plan within an urgent but adequate timeframe. This in turn would need to be ratified, and developed into funded action plans.

Despite massive funding for Auslink I & II, nothing in the flagship “Auslink” goes near to addressing this situation.

The situation we have is one where funding now has to be stretched between road and rail upgrades and maintenance on parallel routes. And no government in Australia has or will have the funds to do this adequately.

No better example exists than Australasia Railway to Darwin, (Federal Coalition), a tremendous project where huge sums of public (and corporate) money went into the rail link, while at the same time more public money continued to be injected into a truckstop building program on the “competing” Stuart Highway (as well as road maintenance funds). All this for 1.5 million tonnes of freight per annum, and serving a few small towns enroute of 1400km of parallel road and rail links that are equivalent to the capacity of a four lane highway. Note that many winding and narrow, gravel-shouldered and poorly line-marked country roads carry more freight.

Similarly, between Albury and Melbourne there is a four lane freeway, old highway, and two gauges of railway. Yet at the same time, urgent safety upgrades in numerous locations across Australia, such as the West Tamar Highway wait up to decades because of “lack of available funds” including roads that carry similar tonnages, have far more light traffic mixing with large vehicles, yet are vastly inadequate in safety terms –for example the Princes Highway on the South Coast of NSW.

In Tasmania, the forced introduction of B-Doubles (Federal Labor) due to the need for “efficiency” in competition (against rail), meant public money being spent on road upgrades, which resulted in more trucks due to them out-competing the (then) publicly funded parallel Australian National railway. Yet at the same time there was no safety funding for other roads where there was no parallel rail system, and an unsafe mix of heavy and light vehicles.

And of special interest. The RACV Victoria fought hard for ten years to have the highway to Geelong listed as national Highway/RONI, while in a stroke of a pen, VISY roads for forest product to their planned pulp mill at Tumut NSW were added (with funding) to the map of RONIs!.

It is vital to stress that if these recommended “Third Tier” changes are not made, the expected doubling of road freight haulage alone, as well as in combination with the growth in ageing drivers plus inexperienced young drivers, will mean far greater unsafe incidents, and will very certainly result over decades to come, in increases in death and serious injury to include many more Australians, including truck drivers, and particularly, more senior and young members of the community.

At the same time, the financial costs, and drain on emergency services, hospital and broader health industry will be massive. We need to remember that as well as the terrible human costs, road trauma currently costs the nation $14.5 Billion plus per annum. The additional road crashes will cost Australians massively in terms of deaths, injury, drain on the already strained health system, emergency services and police services, and the economy.

That affect hasn’t just happened. It has been growing in pace since post WWII. Old transport historians/enthusiasts like myself remember that the Privy Council Commissioners warned of this future in the landmark Hughes and Vales case of 1954, that allowed for the beginnings of a flood of interstate trucks onto totally unsuitable roads. (NSW alone had around 700 deaths in that year, prior to the privy Council decision.

Added to the safety issues, the changes have made a very significant contribution to climate change from increased exhaust emissions, and the drain on the economy from greater use of expensive imported fuels.

The underpinning basis for such changes as I suggest, follows from acceptance that reduction of exposure to risk through use of the safer transport modes (The “Third Tier”) should be accepted as a integral component of reducing road deaths and injuries. The World Health Organization has stated that one of the key measures to reduce traffic accidents and the adverse results is by reduction of risk exposure, through reduction of motor vehicle usage.

Remember that Australia’s road safety system is vastly incomplete, and our road system very inadequate in safety terms. To make our roads as safe is reasonable possible, we would need to spend at least an estimated additional $50 billion before 2020. And we would need to find another $20billion + to have motor vehicles with as many safe features as possible.

Even if all that money was committed by government (it won’t be, despite the huge spending bias on roads versus rail), it would not eliminate crashes, death and injury so we would need to add a continued spending of upwards of possibly $7 billion per annum to the cost mix.

And perhaps most importantly, it is vital to realize that the inadequacies in our road and road safety system is fundamental to facilitating road under-pricing rail, and having faster transit times, (so-called competitiveness) so adding more trucks on the road, higher risks, more crashes and adds massively to the road trauma costs.

The process of developing and implementing a National Strategic Plan to contain and mimimize the overall growth in road freight transport and private motor vehicle use over future decades faces much complexity and difficulty, yet it is vital for safety, health and economic reasons.

While there is a strong case for getting freight from road to rail, it can be done much more efficiently and creatively, using “seamless” intermodal transport. Already in Australia there are road transferable locomotives, and freight multiple units, and there are opportunities for other developments if we can take away the factors that favour and encourage road transport and car culture.

In many cases, the better short to mid-term move is for better intermodalism rather then just “put it on rail”.

As with freight, there are opportunities to get people away from all-car journeys to intermodal journeys, but there needs to be much more intelligent approaches. For example, motorail (car on train) services in Australia are slow, inflexible and inefficient, but there are proven possibilities for enhancements as used in Europe.

Given this already untenable situation, I find it almost bizarre that the proposed Gunns Pulp Mill will feed significant additional numbers of log trucks and other heavy vehicles into the Tasmanian situation. Regarding possible rail haulage, already we have seen Pacific National recently pull out of certain rail haulage, and as I said in Tasmanian Times some months ago, ( Mill: transport deaths and injuries ) there is no guarantee that it will not in time pull out of Tasmania altogether. Given this weeks announcements, I reiterate that wishful thinking does not replace commercially-based decisions in these situations.

We need a plan and the will of government to change this for the good of everyone, and that includes the truck drivers who all know, no matter how error free they may be, that they have to play dodgems very regularly. I know this from large vehicle driving experience (bus not truck).

I welcome any feedback.
Peter Mackenzie is a transport researcher and hsitorian from Northern Tasmania.