Is speed really a killer?

BY PETER MCKAY

It's the mantra all drivers learn from the time they first slap on L-plates: the faster you go, the greater your chance of a serious crash.

The reasoning is simple. The greater your speed, the less time you have to react to a problem, the greater the braking distance required and the greater the forces involved in any collision.

But is it always this clear cut?

Not according to pro-speed campaigners, who are agitating for governments around the world to raise speed limits, particularly in rural areas and on stretches of high-quality highway.

They passionately argue boredom and frustration, rather than speed, are the main killers when people are travelling between isolated rural communities.

With car safety rapidly improving, Australian campaigners see remote parts of western NSW and Queensland, the Nullarbor, north-west Victoria and parts of Western Australia and South Australia as prime candidates for a substantially increased speed limit. Some advocate the total removal of speed limits on these types of roads as a way of reducing the road toll.

Take the case of US activist Chad Dornsife. The executive director of lobby group the Best Highway Safety Practices Institute, he is pushing for the removal of speed limits in his homeland on the grounds it will lower the number of high-risk overtaking moves and reduce trip time and fatigue.

He believes drivers are at their safest (suffering from less stress and impatience) when they are in their comfort zone.

Like many pro-speed campaigners, he points to Germany's often speed-limit-free autobahns as a shining example, saying they have recently recorded an all-time-low death toll due to their "emphasis on flow management rather than speed limits".

"The autobahns are a successful model, which have become a political embarrassment for every other EU country," says Dornsife, a 63-year-old who drives tens of thousands of kilometres annually in his job.

Dornsife is far from alone.

In Australia, lobby group the National Motorists Association of Australia (NMAA) has called for higher limits on appropriate stretches of road as a way of lowering fatalities.

The debate over speed limits has also recently been put into focus by comments by NRMA Motoring & Services on plans to lower the speed limit on the NSW section of the Newell Highway. (The NMAA and NRMA are similarly named but not linked.)

In August the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) completed a review of safety on the highway, which runs through the outback and links Victoria and Queensland via NSW. In it the authority announced plans to lower the 110km/h limit to 100km/h, citing problems with "road geometry [and] traffic volumes".

This prompted a heated response from the NRMA, which argued in this case speed would save lives. The president of the NRMA, Wendy Machin, said a 100km/h limit would add an hour to the travel time between the Queensland and Victorian borders.

"Fatigue is the major factor among casualties on the Newell Highway, with around 26 per cent of casualties in 2007 involving fatigue," she said, citing the RTA's own research. "This figure is higher than other country highways [15 per cent in 2007]."

On the issue of whether there's a case to raise limits in some areas over the 110km/h maximum in force across most of Australia, the NRMA is more cautious.

"Our position is consistent, whether the proposal be to raise or to lower speed limits," says a spokesman, Peter Khoury. "This is that before any change be made, the RTA needs to provide evidence showing how it would improve the road toll."

So are there indications that a raised speed limit could save lives?

That depends who you believe. RTA figures suggest just the opposite, with the number of fatalities involving speed high and on the rise.

"To date in 2009, 44 per cent of fatalities involved speed," a spokesman says. "In 2008, 40 per cent of fatalities involved excessive speed or speed inappropriate for the conditions. The evidence from many studies shows that reducing speed limits saves lives and reduces severe injuries."

An RTA spokeswoman says crashes deemed speed related can include those where the speed involved may have been below the posted limit.

As far as fatigue is concerned, RTA figures show so far this year it has been involved in 18 per cent of fatalities, an increase from the 17 per cent in 2008.

The National Motorists Association of Australia is sceptical of the sums and favours an increase in the speed limit in some cases.

"Sensible higher limits will rid our roads of much intimidating and aggressive driving," says the association's vice president, Gavin Goeldner. "The biggest killer on the roads is not speed but inattention."

The association is concerned the proportion of speed-related fatalities being reported in NSW is higher than in other states and across the world and suggests speed is being wrongly blamed for some accidents.

It believes speed is put down as a primary cause when factors such as alcohol, drugs, unregistered vehicles, unlicensed drivers, police pursuits and other criminal activity are major contributing factors.

The NMAA supports limits over 110km/h on several grounds: reduced journey times and possibility of fatigue, reduced exposure to oncoming traffic while on the wrong side of the dotted white line when overtaking and a reduction in impatience and road rage.

"Sensible higher limits will rid our roads of much intimidating and aggressive driving," Goeldner says.

The 900-kilometre two- and sometimes three-lane Hume Highway between Sydney and Melbourne is an example of a road that looks capable of coping comfortably with a 130km/h limit for passenger vehicles.

Another advocate of higher limits is a professor at Northeast Lakeview College in Texas, Robert Yowell, who independently examined what happened in the US in 1995 when states began setting higher rural speed limits.

Last year he told cnn.com the results were clear. "By and large, across the 50 states, there was no discernible effect from the higher limits," he said. "Two or three states actually had a decrease in fatalities."

Yowell said motorists travelling fastest on the higher-speed interstates tended to be good at that kind of driving. The less competent drivers at high speeds tended to drive more slowly.

Meanwhile, there's still debate on the Northern Territory's experiment with speed limits. In 2007 the territory's government decided to place a 130km/h limit on four major highways that had previously been limit-free - the Stuart, Arnhem, Barkly and Victoria.

In the first two years of the 130km/h limit, the territory's toll leapt alarmingly above the last of the open-slather years, from 35 deaths in 2004, 55 in 2005 and 44 in 2006 to 57 in 2007 followed by a tragic jump last year to 75 fatalities - the worst for 21 years.

However, the chief executive officer of the Northern Territory's Department of Planning and Infrastructure, Richard Hancock, says there was a reduction in fatalities on the highways themselves.

Between 2002 and 2006 there was an average of 12.6 fatalities each year on these roads. This fell to seven in 2007 and 2008.

So far this year, the overall toll is down significantly, but other factors could be influencing the figures, such as the global economic crisis.

- © Fairfax NZ News