Driving and road safety in Australia

Australia is one of the safest and easiest places in the world to drive, despite the authorities' efforts to pretend that just slipping behind the wheel is a prelude to death or dismemberment

Australian road safety advertisements, brought to you courtesy of bodies like Victoria's Transport Accident Commission (TAC), have become famous around the world for their graphic and hard-hitting nature.  Every night, Australians can sit in front of their televisions and see rag doll motorcyclists bouncing off the fronts of trucks, children's heads hitting car windscreens like ripe coconuts, and small villages of grieving friends and relatives.

TAC ads:  these are the healthy-looking ones

Deaths on the road feature prominently on news broadcasts.  After the audience has been given the gruesome details, they are treated to the updated annual road toll for the state, with the new numbers chalked up.  Holiday periods have their own mortality statistics, in which the performances of the various parts of the country are compared.

This media blitz certainly seem to work, at least if the aim is to persuade the country that its roads are a place of perpetual menace.  You don't have to look far to find an Aussie who is willing to discuss the country's apparently appalling road death toll.  It's sometimes difficult not to leave these conversations convinced that a fair proportion of their compatriots are inherently lethal drivers, born to maim and kill as if to original sin.

Yet for anyone from overseas who has actually driven here, much of this is baffling.  Australian roads are wide, with ample parking, and generally well-maintained compared to other countries.  They certainly don't look like death traps.  Australian motorists are generally far more observant of speed limits than most of their foreign counterparts.  In my experience they're also more likely to behave courteously, waiting patiently for their turn to drive through narrow spaces, or for the person in front of them to finish a parking manoeuvre.  Most of the cars don't look to be in particularly bad condition either.  

Despite this, and armed with myriad statistics, the TAC and others seem to believe that they are falling behind other developed nations in the battle to make the roads safer.  However, as is the way with statistics, other factors point the other way.  By any objective analysis, Australia's road safety record is in fact very good.  It has massively reduced its annual traffic mortality rate (deaths per 100,000 of the population) since the 1970s, from a high of 30.4 to 6.9 in 2008.  On the downside, the rate has, in relative terms, plateaued over the past few years, but this has also been the case in most other countries that have made similar strides.  

The list of large-population developed countries above it is small, though, consisting of such nations as Germany, Japan, the UK and Scandinavia.  Critically, as of 2007 Australia's road safety was better (when measured in this way) than Canada, and streets ahead of New Zealand (a rate of 10.1) and the USA (13.9).

It's hard to deny that the distressing scenes in the advertisements portray a truth about road accidents and the damage they cause.  Campaigners would doubtless argue that if they deter anyone from dangerous driving, and a life is thereby saved, then they're justified.  

However, they do also appear to instil a false consciousness about road safety, more reminiscent of the bad old days of the 1970s than today's reality.  Which is that Australia is one of the very safest places in the world to be on the roads.  Of course, any road transport involves some risk - but just be grateful that you're driving here, where that risk is minimal, rather than in most of the other 193 member states of the United Nations.

Hook turns

On your first day of driving in central Melbourne, try not to go anywhere that involves turning right...

Unfortunately, if you're going to take to the roads here, at some point you're going to have to do it.  And I hope it will be less fraught for you than it was for me.  The first time I indicated to turn right, it was followed swiftly by a terrified yelp of "left!" from my wife, a crescendo of car horns and a swift rummage through my vocabulary for my choicest expletives.

I was aware, vaguely, that Melbourne is the world capital of the obscure traffic manoeuvre known as the hook turn.  I had gawped at it, slack-jawed, as a tourist.  I had subsequently mentioned it at dinner parties in London, holding my audience rapt (so I thought) in the manner of an explorer recounting the details of a year spent amongst cannibals.  And damn it, I'd even married a Melbourne girl.  But despite all this it was about five years after my first visit to the city before I ventured into its centre in a hire car, and somehow so counter-intuitive a move had slipped my mind.

Counter-intuitive, that is, except in a city that uses the tram as one of its major forms of public transport.  Melbourne was blessed, shortly after its inception, with a plan which involved a grid of exceptionally broad streets.  This later enabled tram tracks to be run down the centre of many of them, whilst still leaving plenty of room for other vehicles.  The only problem with this arises when drivers want to turn across the oncoming traffic (which, as Australia drives on the left, means a right turn).  Under normal traffic rules - even the ones that apply in the rest of Melbourne - this means moving to the right, stopping, and waiting to complete the turn.  However, this would mean stopping on the tram tracks, thus blocking them, which would cause bigger problems in the busy centre than elsewhere.

Which brings us to the hook turn, which involves nothing more than turning right from the left hand lane.  If you want to see an animated example of how this works in an ideal world, click here.  In my case it tends to include violent jerking of my head as I attempt both to check the traffic lights (in front of me) and the traffic coming from behind, followed by a Starsky and Hutch-style squeal of tyres as I turn 90 degrees at speed in the nanosecond between the lights turning red and a taxi hitting me in the side.

The hook turn broadly divides Melburnians into two groups.  On the one hand there are those who see that it is a sensible and necessary compromise to enable public transport to run smoothly in their city.  On the other there are those who simply avoid driving in its centre at all costs.

The city elders could probably help the hook turn virgin a little more.  Australians have a mania for public signage, much of it confusing owing to its sheer profusion and small size (you can fit more signs in that way, see?).  The signs indicating Melbourne's most confusing traffic rule certainly suffer from these issues.  Apart from that, it's difficult to see any other way of doing things, apart from getting rid of either trams or cars, neither of which is about to happen.

On the other hand, if you happen to be in Melbourne seeing the sights, you should certainly take a minute or two out to see some drivers attempting one.  After all, people shouting at each other are so much more entertaining when you're not involved.

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