A nation of flashers should show some modesty

As with drivers who flash their lights at you, most of us think that radio announcements about the locations of police speed cameras are godsends. Flashing at your fellow motorists and phoning up special radio hotlines to breathlessly join in foiling those hapless coppers sitting there is becoming part of what it means to be an Australian. Traffic reports are tagged with coy little asides about a “photo opportunity on Boundary Road”. Radio stations gain loyalty points from their listeners, thousands of whom each week would personally ease off as they were about to hit a just-announced surveillance section. Wow, thanks guys! I’ll stay tuned to my radio friends who just saved me my licence or $600.

The police actually encourage these announcements. Over the recent Queen’s Birthday weekend, New South Wales police publicised camera locations. The idea is that publicity will cause a general increase in awareness that the cameras are “out there”. Little by little, the theory goes, motorists given these daily reminders will have the message sink in and we’ll all slow down. We’ll all be safer and in joining in the camera-spotting will have gained some fuzzy communal capital too. Nice idea: shame though about the lack of any evidence to support it.

If they really believe all this, why, then, don’t radio stations and the police use the same rationalisations and blow the cover on random breath testing units? The New South Wales police say they would take a totally different attitude to what the PR plod I spoke to described as “a criminal and highly dangerous offence that only relatively few people do”. But it’s the randomness of random breath testing that gives the process its deterrent potency. If you know there’s a booze bus in the direction you’re travelling, you can take a different route home from the pub. But if it’s random and unannounced, you think about the wisdom of driving every time you’re out and drinking. If you know there’s a speed camera up ahead, you can take your foot off until you’ve passed it and flash the lights at other motorists. Tricked the bastards, didn’t we!

The talkback take on speeding is that it’s all a grubby money-grab, clinging to the shirt tails of a worthy cause. The police are just errand boys for the Treasury. So why don’t we hear the same argument run about drink driving, where the fines are even larger? It’s because we make the assumption that drink driving is so much more dangerous than speeding. Professor Jack McLean and Craig Kloeden from the University of Adelaide’s Road Accident Research Unit investigated 151 Adelaide crashes requiring ambulances in 60 km/h zones on non-rainy days where drivers were not drunk and not undertaking illegal manoeuvres like U-turns. Using computer-aided crash reconstruction techniques, and matching each crash vehicle with four other randomly selected comparison vehicles – all speed-timed, and all drivers breath tested – they found that each 5 km/h increase in speed above 60 km/h in urban areas increased the risk of a casualty crash by roughly the same amount as each increase in blood alcohol concentration of 0.05 g/100 mL. In other words, speed and drink are about equal as predictors of serious crashes.1

In 1979, 3,573 people were killed on Australia’s public roads. More than half of them were aged 15–34, the main audience group for the stations that broadcast the speed camera locations. By 1997, despite population growth, this carnage had fallen to 1,800 – an amazing 99 percent reduction in 18 years. But the relentless pursuit of an ever-falling road toll always comes at a price. For example, if all drivers were obliged, like motor cyclists, to wear crash helmets, then deaths from head injury would fall way further. But would the community be prepared to trade such inconvenience for further reductions?

Historically, the debate on the road toll has seen the hotel industry opposing random breath testing, arguing po-faced that it would cost jobs. Undertakers and the wheelchair trade apparently decided to cut their losses. Civil liberties groups once opposed compulsory seat belts and helmets. Some car manufacturers resisted the introduction of compulsory high-mounted brake lights, and barriers in station wagons designed to restrain luggage rocketing through the car and snapping the necks of passengers. Speed enthusiasts have long strenuously objected to speed laws. Like the gun lobby, they argue that there are safe drivers and unsafe drivers and the answer is more driver education. The apparent enthusiasm of radio stations and their young audiences for the sport of speed camera dobbing may well be a sign that the community values the right to speed more highly than shaving more lives and quadriplegics off the annual road toll. There are probably few who would feel comfortable in saying upfront, “Look, I think I do enough already to play my part in reducing the road toll. I don’t want to be restricted anymore – too bad if this means there are going to be a few hundred or so lives ruined. It’s not my responsibility.”

We prefer to surreptitiously cast our vote in this continuing opinion poll by flashing our lights. Next time you’re tempted to flash or phone up and ruin the police camera party, ask yourself what’s more important: the petty satisfaction of fleeting solidarity with other anonymous drivers at having thwarted the police, or the thought that someone, ego-bruised by having their licence cancelled for a cooling-off period, might hit the road next time a little calmer.