Holiday road toll - a pathetic response

As usual this holiday period, we ended up with a large number of dead Australians and an even larger number injured as a result of accidents on our substandard roads.

It's a sad and sorry set of statistics that are exploited by our State Governments to justify their *pathetic* road safety measures and response.

I use the word *pathetic* because that is what it is.

The States aren't serious about dealing with road safety. If they were they would do a lot more to understand accident causes and then they would design programs to educate and inform road users and build a policing system that complimented that.

But what they actually have is poor information and a policing system that is designed to punish road users. And then they usually deliver a simplistic *message* all designed to generate *fear* and capture as much *revenue* as possible.

How often do we hear that "speed kills" and "drink driving" is evil? Far too often - to the extent that "Bill and Betty Bogan" now believe this to be true - irrespective of the evidence.

The facts are that we don't know the root cause of the majority of road deaths - because the important data are not collected - and it's certainly not analyzed in any scientific way.

We don't know the driver occupation, state of mind and any distractions, the mindset and circumstances of other vehicle occupants, the vehicle state, the weather state, the road conditions, the traffic conditions, and a hundred other important variables associated with these deaths from road accidents - because these data are simply not collected and analyzed by the authorities.

Instead, they collect a small and rudimentary subset of the necessary data and then they try to fit these to the circumstances of all road accidents and end up with - "speed kills" and "alcohol is evil".

This has been going on now for 30+ years - hundreds of low level bureaucrats and police sergeants have built careers on telling a gullible media that we road users are "dumb fu_ks" - and wringing their hands about the shocking road toll.

The stupid thing is that we let them get away with it. Maybe one day it will change - as if.