monotonehell wrote:warpspeed wrote:The Government really should up the speed limit on the Northern Expressway to 130.
Great way to increase fatalities by around 20%. Loads of research has shown this correlation in both ways (increased speeds led to increased fatalities & decreased speeds led to decrease in fatalities).
However, if anyone wants to discuss this further I suggest they make a topic in the Pub, and link to it.
Correlation does not equal causation. I know it's a stupid analogy but I could prove that consumption of eggs is correlated with increased road fatality.
As an emergency worker, I have attended countless motor vehicle accidents and in none of them has speed been the major contributing factor. Inattention, preoccupation, drugs, alcohol and wanker driving (fish tailing, circle work, etc), fatigue have all played much bigger roles in the cause and outcome of an event than speed. Granted, speed does increase the severity of an incident as you would expect, but lowering speed limits or refusing to raise them is simply a knee jerk reaction to the inevitability of people finding inventive ways to kill themselves.
The other thing we fail to take into account is the increasing complexity of factory installed safety devices in motor vehicles. Airbags, seatbelt pre-tensioning, ABS brakes, cruise control, collision detection and assisted braking, Flashing hard breaking lights, blind spot detection, birdseye camera displays, reflected HUD, FLIR, and don't get me started on parking assistance. Granted not all of this technology is available in economically accessible vehicles at this point but within ten years will no doubt be mostly standard across the board. Our cars are fast becoming some of the safest in history and we need to recognise that between this and well prepared roads (wide, consistent and with the wired collision rails someone else mentioned, it has never been safer to do higher speeds on select public roads. The Northern Expressway is a perfect example of one that will accept a higher speed limit with minimal side effect, I would imagine.