The deaths of two people over three days on Canberra's roads are both tragic and bitterly ironic, coming right after the Chief Minister's recent Road Safety Roundtable. There, Jon Stanhope expressed the hope that Canberra could adopt a ''Vision Zero'', a firm commitment to a zero fatality rate on our roads to be achieved by a cultural shift in attitudes to speeding and drink driving, among other things.
Experience in Australia and abroad tells us that reducing speed in urban areas drastically improves the survival chances of people involved in collisions. The University of Adelaide's Centre for Automotive Safety Research found that pedestrian fatalities in South Australia almost all occurred on roads with speed limits of 60km/h and above. John Whitelegg, Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of York, points out that in a collision at above 50km/h, people hit by a car while walking or cycling have a 90per cent chance of dying.
The Adelaide study found that the introduction of a 50km/h limit in SA was associated with a ''substantial and significant'' reduction in pedestrian casualties.
People in cars, people on motorbikes, people in buses, people on bicycles and people on foot are all people. We all deserve some space and some respect on the road, and we all deserve to be safe.
Reducing speed is just one strategy to make our roads safer and more inclusive. Let's hope that Vision Zero provides the opportunity for some open and creative thinking about this and other issues in the near future.
Let's take up the challenge to imagine what our roads could be like.
Tony Shields, Pedal Power ACT Athletes and HECS
The Government should give serious thought to any proposal to impose a HECS-type fee on athlete scholarship holders at the Australian Institute of Sport before going ahead with it.
There are many in the wider community who would welcome the proposal because they resent athletes at the AIS, on the misguided assumption that these athletes have it easy, living off the taxpayer's purse. It is not a simple matter of paying for training when earning dollars in sport later on.
Athletes who go through the AIS are either in sports such as water polo, gymnastics and athletics, which do not offer career earnings, if any, for any except a small handful, or they have a very limited age-related career window anyway.
While they are at the AIS, the demands of their scholarship are enormous, and most have to put outside careers on hold or in many cases change intended career choices altogether. They struggle with the stress of watching former schoolmates getting on with careers while they battle with disappointment, injury and eventual failure in their bid to make it to the top in their chosen sport.
If the proposal is introduced as government policy, many aspiring athletes will think twice before committing themselves to debt, and Australia will risk losing its depth of sporting talent to non-sporting fields of endeavour.
And the question must be asked, does the Government intend to include future paralympians in this proposal?
Australia earns enormous global collateral with the medals our athletes earn on the world stage in events like the Olympic Games, Paralympic Games and world championships, and it is these athletes who provide it.
In the wider scheme of things, I think Australia will benefit far more in the long run for leaving the system of nurturing our athletes as it is, rather than including it in the Government's tax grab bag. And the athletes themselves will be forever grateful.
John Bell, Lyneham