I’m going to sound like a stuck record in this week’s Opinion piece, but so is everyone else when talking about speed limits, so what’s the point in my being any different? These depressing thoughts struck me as the Christmas Day/New Year weekends ended and the road toll continued to be virtually unchanged – up in some areas, much the same in others, thankfully down in a few places.

As usual the holiday period began with politicians who have little or no knowledge of driving spouting off about road safety and quoting misleading numbers about the percentage of crashes caused by exceeding limits. Numbers that were sometimes five to ten times those shown by hard statistcs.

Then the police cancelled all leave, issued dire warnings about being everywhere and promised we would all get caught for speeding sooner rather than later.

TV stations jumped on the bandwagon by running ghastly car-crash commercials. Their news departments then kept a running score on the tens of thousands of people booked, and another gruesome list on the number of road deaths. It never seemed to cross their minds that the concentration on the former wasn’t affecting the latter.

From time to time an earnest looking policeman would feature on the TV news with a story of a lunatic driver caught doing something like 124 km/h in a 60 km/h zone. The inference being that we would all drive at such stupid speeds but for the vigilance of the police force. Which I say is arrant nonsense. Only a tiny minority of drivers are idiots.

This enormous concentration on speed enforcement isn’t working. Road deaths are much the same for the corresponding periods every year. Overall, they continue to remain much the same, or decline slowly, with no change in the shape of the graph that can be attributed to the introduction of speed cameras and overblown drive-slowly campaigns. The drop in road deaths is due to much better cars, greatly improved roads and better and faster medical intervention.

I’ve said this before and am saying it again. The vast majority of drivers will travel at the correct speed for the circumstances and shouldn’t be pinged for technical breaches of limits. Those who do drive at an excessive speed for the conditions should be dealt with very harshly, preferably in some way that will keep them off our roads until they finally wake up to their own stupidity.

Varied results come from road-safety research worldwide, but the general conclusion is that excessive speed is responsible for between three and eight per cent of road crashes. So why do driving-slowly campaigns occupy something like 90 per cent of the long-weekend road-safety news? And result in tens of millions of dollars of extra government revenue?

Or does my second question answer the first?

ewan@marque.com.au