Back in 1995 the premier Bob Carr, and his roads minister, Carl Scully, proudly launched their ambitious program called "Road Safety 2000" stating that New South Wales would have the safest roads in the world with less than 500 deaths and 5500 injuries on the roads each year.
When the millennium came around, the NSW annual road toll was in excess of 600 fatalities.
Scully quietly dumped the Road Safety 2000 program faster than a extraterrestrial explanation given by Moulder and launched "Road Safety 2010" campaign instead, boasting a saving of 820 lives by the year 2005 and 2000 lives by the year 2010.
Yet by the end of 2005 the road fatalities in NSW had not dropped below 500.
Now, not only has the NSW Government moved the goal posts but they have changed their shape too!
The NSW Government have benched the globally agreed "deaths per hundred thousand of population" measurement and instead have committed to reducing "vehicle crash deaths per 100 million vehicle kilometers travelled".
This
clever little change has given the government some extra variables that will
artificially change the results they are promoting. For example with petrol prices rising, people will travel less or use more public transport, so there will be a fall in the number of road deaths, even though there has been no change in road safety trends.
In 2003, the year of the most recent data available from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau, the NSW rate of motor vehicle crash fatalities per 100 million kilometres travelled by vehicles was 0.89, which is
the second highest of all Australian states and higher than the overall Australian average rate of 0.81
There are other suspect practices by the government, in NSW for example, the RTA and police have a nice little arrangement called the "enhanced enforcement program" or EEP. Last year the RTA gave the NSW police approximately $8 million dollars to pay for their overtime whilst the police conducted road safety enforcement operations - in other words speed enforcement, random breath testing and other traffic duties
Now whilst it's agreed the police should be paid for their overtime, heck they deserve a pay rise I say, but such suspect payments compromise the independence of the police and how and where they carry out their duties.
These payments in effect, enable the Minister for Roads to dictate how, when and where the police operate these traffic duties. The effectiveness of these methods has not been independently investigated.
Of course the police won't criticize the Road Traffic Authority because actually getting paid for your overtime is appealing, particularly when their pays are in desperate need of review.
The payment for overtime should come from the Treasury, not the RTA and the high road fatalities can in theory, be partly blamed on the NSW Police association due to its opposition to modern work practices and technologies that would reduce road trauma significantly and improve the safety of its members.