In Sweden if you drive under the speed limit, a traffic camera snaps your vehicle and enters you in a lottery where the prizes are funded by drivers who speed.
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In the ACT, the rewards are not as financial but certainly more quirky.
Based on an idea trialled in NSW, the ACT is rolling out its "smiley face" driver reward program.
It's a proactive approach to speed reduction which began in February 2018 at 17 specific sites around Canberra and aims at providing "positive reinforcement" by rewarding compliant drivers with a green smiley face lit up on a roadside LED screen.
There's a speed radar integrated with the sign so that if you're over the speed limit, the sign flashes up with "Slow Down".
The signs, borrowed from NSW, have been rotated five times around the ACT over 20 months and have been such a success, the government is looking to permanently acquire them.
"I think in the ACT we've got to be willing to try new things and see if they work," Road Safety Minister Shane Rattenbury said.
"If they work, we scale them up."
He said that the signs are not an enforcement device, but an informational one.
"Canberra motorists have responded to them [the signs] really well," he said.
"In some areas we've seen a 12km/h reduction in the speed zones where the smiley signs have been located.
"On every site, we saw a reduction in speeds."
The signs have been deployed across a number of different speed limit zones.
The big reductions have been in places such as Stonehaven Crescent, in Deakin, where before signs went in only 15 per cent of drivers obeyed the speed limit but in subsequent weeks, speed compliance rose to 61 per cent.
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More critically, in Casey Crescent, Tuggeranong, where the radar monitored speeds in school zones for Calwell High School and St Francis of Assisi Primary School, compliance using the smiley face went from 17 per cent to 74 per cent over a 10-week period.
"We originally allocated $40,000 for this program out of the road safety fund and now, given the program's success, we will allocate $20,000 more to both identify more sites, and have some more of the actual devices," Mr Rattenbury said.
He said the overall objective was to improve the "road safety culture" of the ACT, which has taken somewhat of a setback since the COVID-19 restrictions have been in place.
In May, ACT's top traffic cop Inspector Marcus Boorman expressed his frustration at the poor driver behaviour across the ACT.
"It shouldn't take the threat of being caught to make people do the right thing, because these people are simply risking lives. This behaviour has to stop," he said.
