Alanna Davis was driving to the South Coast this time last year intending to spend a couple of days winding down with her son and her friends before returning home to Canberra for Christmas. It was a journey she would not finish.
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It was a warm, "beautiful day" and driving conditions on the Kings Highway were near perfect when her car was involved in a crash on the Kings Highway, just west of Braidwood.
She and her four passengers were blameless victims, caught up in a collision between two other cars ahead of her. The highway was closed for hours as an emergency helicopter was called in to airlift her injured son to hospital.
The trauma from that incident will never leave her. One year on, her flashes of memory from the crash remain raw and vivid. She and her son have been in and out of hospital for the past 12 months. The scars may have healed, but the emotional pain lingers on.
So when NSW and ACT police gathered on Friday to issue their regular warning to drivers about being responsible and patient on the Kings Highway during the upcoming, busy Christmas-New Year holiday period, their road safety messages carried a special resonance for Ms Davis.
"Police have a job to do but really, the responsibility for keeping the roads safe should be with everyone out there, the driving public," she said.
"Everyone has to do the right thing and look after each other."
She implored drivers to put away their phones, not to drive after drinking or taking drugs, and to avoid driving when fatigued.
"And please, please wear your seat belt; wearing a seat belt saved my son's life," she added.
In a few short days, the Kings Highway will become the most intensely policed section of road in the NSW southern region.
Police on both sides of the ACT/NSW border are unapologetic about the amount of attention this 137km section of highway will receive as they sweep it with speed detection and number plate recognition systems during the Chrsitmas-New Year period.
NSW Acting Sergeant Angus Duncombe, based out of the South Coast, said the population of Batemans Bay will swell in size from 17,000 to about 40,000 people over the Christmas New Year period, and "there will be lots of blue and white [ACT number] plates" among them.
NSW Highway Patrol will operate overlapping 12-hours shifts into Christmas Day, with their numbers supplemented by other cars and officers out of Sydney from Boxing Day onwards. Traffic build-up can be expected during the day at places such as when entering Braidwood, on the winding sections of the Clyde Mountain, at the Nelligen bridge, and at the roundabout where the Kings Highway meets the Princes Highway at Batemans Bay.
ACT Policing will be patrolling its much shorter eastern sections of the highway, with speed detection vans also in place.
Section upgrades, realignments and better sign posting has brought steady improvements to the safety record of the Kings Highway since the horror year of 2004 when six people were killed along the route. However, regular spikes in fatal crashes such as in 2008, when five people were killed, and again in 2012 when another five died, indicates that driver behaviour and attitude are the most significant contributing factors to road trauma.
Acting Sergeant Dave Wills, in charge of ACT's traffic operations, urged everyone using the highway to "respect other road users".
"We see a lot of driver impatience at this time; it's very busy and people are chafing at the bit to get down to the beach," he said.
"But the reality is that everyone has to use the same piece of road, so if everyone accepts that it's going to take a little longer to get there and adjusts their mindset accordingly, then the highway will be that much safer."
