ACT drivers have a deserved reputation for being terrible. And I can think of nothing to say in our defense. Nothing at all.
Anybody who sits on the speed limit along, say, Adelaide Avenue around peak hour will know what I mean. You're steadily overtaken by most of the cars that you share the road with. What's more, insistence upon going the speed limit will occasionally be met by aggressive tailgating. Well, maybe not occasionally. Most of the time.
The driver etiquette surrounding the numerous large roundabouts that dot our roads is also perplexing. Roundabouts are supposed to smooth out the traffic flow through intersections. You're not meant to enter them until they are clear. But anyone trying to get through them in order to get to work on time, or get to the school in time to pick up the kids, and so on, will recognize that they frequently create the imperative to barrel into them at the first signs of a seam.
People often have inflated opinions of themselves as drivers. I know I do. But it takes rare skill to, say, take the roundabout at Russell Offices at any appreciable speed, especially if you are on the inside lane. More often than not, what happens is, you drift, and so create a traffic hazard, and so on. It really is amazing that there aren’t more accidents here, around the roundabouts.
Of course, Canberra is home to a small but clamorous minority on our roads. They're recognizable by their blue numberplates, with the prefix "DC". These people don’t have to play by our quaint road rules, and they frequently don't. In fact, I'm pretty sure that getting a traffic citation while living in Canberra is a point of pride for a small minority within this minority. Again, anyone who has ever sat behind a DC driver while they straddle two (and sometimes three) lanes of traffic, while going thirty or forty kilometers under the speed limit, will know what I mean.
And it's not just people driving cars along our generously wide roads who cause problems. Hands up anybody who has almost wiped out a cyclist around an on or off ramp. Good. That's most of you. I can still recall with chilling clarity a near miss on a guy riding one of those low to the ground contraptions with the pedals forward of the seat. He had attached to his trike a small orange flag, which I just saw out of the corner of my eye in time to swerve and miss my turnoff.
I admire such people. I really do. To take the arrogance and foolhardiness of your bog standard Canberra Driver and apply it to riding in traffic on such a contraption takes a special kind of courage, which might tentatively be call an Absence of the Fear of Death.
Finding statistics on the number of car/bike collisions is quite difficult. In the 2007–08 Financial year, though, there were 9889 vehicle collisions in the ACT, 568 of which resulted in injury. Surprisingly, this figure represents a downward trend for the previous five prior financial years. When you consider that there were a little over a thousand collisions resulting in injury in 2004–06, you might surmise that the only way to go is down, though.
The Australian Federal Police gauge road fatality statistics in terms of fatalities per 100, 000 head of population. In 2007–08 the ACT’s number was 4.4, down from 6.8 in 05–06 but up from just 2.8 in 03–04. Over the past five years these numbers have been consistently lower than the national average, which is a good thing, I guess. In their annual report, however, the police caution that the Territory is "a small jurisdiction, with relatively few motor vehicle deaths, [and so] small changes in the number of fatalities can dramatically affect this performance indicator."
If you can get over road deaths being referred to as a KPI, what you can see here is that the concern by the people who are charged to keep our roads safe that this figure might spike quite spectacularly in any given year. Reading police media releases to do with traffic related issues reinforces this impression. They usually contain phrases like "ACT Policing remain disappointed with Canberra drivers," and so on. Over the four days of the Easter holidays, they pinged 64 people for speeding in Canberra, for example. They weren’t happy about this, and neither were the people that got nabbed.
On the topic of speeding, the AFP website makes salutary reading. It says that, in urban roads with a 60 kph speed limit, the risk of involvement in a serious injury crash has been found to double with each increase of 5 kph above the speed limit. Additionally, the impact on a person in a crash at 60 kph is equivalent to falling from a four storey building, while the impact at 100 kph equals falling from a 12 storey building.
The reason that the default speed limit in Canberra is 50kph is simple: for a person with ordinary reaction time, the distance it takes to stop a vehicle travelling at 60 kph is at least 10 metres more than at 50 kph. This can make all the difference. It's also the reason that zones around schools are at 40 kph.
I thought about this the other day after driving through a school zone in the Inner South. I dutifully slowed down to 40kph. The car behind me got fed up about halfway through our carriage in the zone, overtook me on a double line marking, and proceeded to zip through the rest of the zone at what must have been 60 or 70kph. I wish I could say that I was surprised.