Friday 14 January 2011

Town Of Speed Wants To Be Renamed Speedkills

The town of Speed, Australia, population 45, along with the Transport Accident Commission, today unveiled a proposal to rename the town 'Speedkills' for a month. Then, if 10,000 people like the campaign's Facebook page, the TAC will donate $10,000 to change the town's signs.


Welcome to Speedkills.
 Population: 45 TAC Indoctrinated Drones.

I await the news that one of Speedkills upstanding residents has been done for watching the road rather than their speedometer.

'Driver's license and registration please. Oh, you're from Speedkills! Well you of all people...'

UPDATE I
After looking into the Australian national road-toll statistics and I've found that on the SaferRoads website it is stated that "More than 30 years ago, Australia's road toll began a dive from over 3,000 deaths every year, to around 1,750. Around 7 years ago that trend stopped and since then, the road toll has been basically stagnant." They also include two graphs, one for the years 1960-2002 and one for the years 2002-2006, unfortunately they have decided to use a cumulative graph for the latter years, which at first gives the impression that the toll has not stayed stagnant but has increased, when in fact it has on average continued on a slight downward trend. I don't know why they have done this.



Click here to enlarge.

Click here to enlarge.
 It is also stated that an Australian road safety strategy could save 700 lives every year by improving road conditions (332 lives), vehicle safety (175 lives), driver behaviour (158 lives), and by adopting improved safety technology (35 lives). No where could I see any data on the what the effects of aggressively targeting speeders or the changing of a town's name would be on the annual road toll.
When you consider that Australia's population has doubled to over 20,000,000 since the 1960's and the number of road users has probably increased out of sight, yet the road toll has actually dived, you can't help but come to the conclusion that it is more likely that it is the vast improvements in car safety and road conditions that have saved lives, not that motorists who are speeding by 10% or so over the limit are receiving fines in the mail and certainly not because there is a tiny town by the name of Speed situated in the middle of fucking nowhere - well, situated 400kms North West of Melbourne to be fair.
Perhaps if Australians really want to save lives, we need to be prepared for the government to spend more of our money more wisely on our roads and highways and freeways, rather than collecting more of our money off speeding motorists and then spending it on crazy business like this 'Speedkills. Population 45' abomination. It seems a reasonable idea.

UPDATE II
This is all getting a little out of hand now.


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2 comments:

William said...

Curbing speeding is only ever about two things, control of the people and raising money from fines.
Here's the Master Plan...

1. Create the problem by repetition in the MSM.
2. Encourage the 'something must be done' and the 'think of the children' righteous to talk to the MSM.
3.The state then reveals its 'solution' control on pain of fine.
4.Coffers fill.
5. Rinse, wash, repeat... whenever the state needs a bit more control of the people or needs a few more pennies today its debts.

Simple but bloody effective and they have the front to call it democracy in action

Groompy Tom said...

William, more effective than I imagined.

I’ve just been on the facebook page trying to put across a simple argument; this is a waste of money because the TAC, funded by VicRoads via compulsory vehicle registration, could save more lives by spending this money elsewhere – as in improving road conditions and automotive safety technology – or even, by their own logic, spending the money on more road safety signs spread over a larger area.
I have been labeled a disgrace, ignorant to the community (ignorant to what community I’m not sure) and told to ‘fuck off to back underneath the rock I crawled out from underneath’.

Very effective indeed!
Do not think, do not research; just obey!

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