Monday, March 29, 2010

Mark Webber is right

Now I don't normally put up my hand in support of Mark Webber - or any of the people who earn a living from entertaining the *bogans* in our community. But I do agree with his recent remarks.

The State Governments and their police forces are up in arms because Mark has dared to question their approach to road safety.

Well it needs to be questioned. The states have spent the best part of 40 years drumming into us the message that road safety and alcohol and speeding are intertwined. They say that each one is totally correlated with the others. It's simply BS.

The reason they do this is because their simplistic strategy for managing the road safety programme is based solely on fear and penalty. It's a complete fear based penalty system - that has been developed and implemented by people with poor analytical capability - and it simply doesn't work.

Actually it does have side benefit in two areas - a) revenue raising and b) gaining political support from the wowsers.

Can you imagine other state based programmes built around fear and penalty?

Lets educate our kids using fear and penalties when they fail.

Lets treat our hospital patients on the basis of fear and penalties when they get sick.

Failed year 10 maths? - that's a $50 fine thanks, a broken leg? - that will be $200 and death? - well that is a $1000 fine. Sounds about right ;-)

It's simply a rubbish system that has not yet evolved - because no-one running it has the necessary smarts.

If the states were to get serious about road safety then they would set up a proper data collection and analysis regime that would collect all the relevant information from road accidents and then they would analyse that and use the outputs to design a proper "carrot and stick" based road safety programme.

It is called "Evidence Based Policy" and would halt the emotional BS that currently dominates this subject.

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