People’s safety on our roads you would think comes before all else, but one resident’s request for a simple speed hump doesn’t stack up against local government budgets and bureaucracy.
The federal Labor government has promised a National Road Safety Office if it wins the May election.
More than 1100 people die on Australian roads every year and thousands of bumps, scrapes and near-misses that never make big news stories.
The idea of “Towards Zero” seems impossible.
Emergency responders save us, carmakers install life-saving ABS, airbags, autonomous emergency braking and adaptive cruise while ANCAP crash tests them, and then there’s the motoring clubs, transport departments and road safety organisations dedicated to reminding us not to crash.
But what are local councils doing to invest in road safety infrastructure? One woman, Naomi, has taken issue with Manningham City Council and what she describes as a disregard for potential of disaster in her street.
She lives on a semi-busy street and seldom leaves her driveway on the blind exit of a downhill corner in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, with her baby in a capsule – it’s a familiar story to millions of rate-paying families.
“As more and more people move into the area, including in our street, the road gets busier and busier and has become a racetrack to some drivers,” she tells AutoTalk.
“We hear it and see it constantly, at all hours, every day of the week, someone hurtling around the bend where our driveway enters the road.
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“One day, someone is going to come flying around the corner and there’s going to be a horrific accident – which is why I’ve asked the council to consider a speed hump to slow people down – but all I’ve received is dismissal,” Naomi explains.
At her request, the council has conducted a routine data log to gather a week’s worth of traffic speeds and volume, which have been shared with AutoTalk.
Manningham Council logged in any one day, with an average of 1800 cars, 17% were above 60km/h, meaning roughly 270 vehicles do more than the 50km/h speed limit in Naomi’s street every day.
The highest recorded speed was 88km/h.
“That kind of speed happens on a weekly basis, every week, often multiple times per week,” she stresses.
However, a Council representative tells Naomi, “the recorded speed and volume of traffic along [omitted] Street is considered to be acceptable”.
The recorded data according to the council shows the 85th percentile speed of motorists recorded outside her home is 53.
6km/h, in a 50km/h zone.
Naomi says she has already approached her local police station who, after “loosely promising” to increase vehicle patrols to catch speeding drivers, directed her to the local council for more permanent solutions.
“It feels like the very real danger facing our family every time we go out they just want to go away – they have their own data showing hundreds of vehicles are speeding in their street but they provide plenty of excuses to not implement something,” she laments.
Manningham Council has told Naomi to cut back vegetation at the front of her property, that the council can’t install speed humps on a corner, and that “issues encountered when installing mirrors in other locations” prevents them from installing a convex mirror as a basic measure on the public road.
The council also tells her “the centre median adjacent to your property.
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[is one of many] treatments [to] assist in reducing through vehicle traffic speeds” in her street.
They have also suggested a dot-matrix “speed trailer” to display vehicle speeds as an “educational tool” to drivers.
A series of roundabouts were installed along Naomi’s street in the 1980s, and some traffic islands on the opposite end in the last decade, but further attempts to curtail drivers’ dangerous speeding habits seem to have run dry.
“Speed humps or any other physical treatment to control the speed of vehicles is based on several criteria including the recorded 85th percentile speed (if it is in excess of 10km (sic) higher than the regulatory speed limit) and the volume recorded along a road,” the council tells Naomi.
“I’m trying to alert the council to do something before there’s a horrible accident, there are elderly people crossing the road here every day, mums and dads walking the dog with their kids – something needs to be done proactively,” Naomi warns.
“Drivers accelerate hard coming out of the last roundabout before coming past my driveway; a speed hump would stop some drivers hitting what would surely be nearly 100km/h at the bottom of the hill,” she adds.
An eight-year-old girl was killed after succumbing to horrific injuries suffered when hit by a car on Victoria Street in Doncaster on November 29.
Local resident John Grouios tells the ABC it’s a hotspot for dangerous circumstances.
“Ninety per cent of cars here would be travelling over the speed limit,” he says.
“We have an accident here once a month.Or a near miss every week; I kept saying it’s just a matter of time before something tragic happens,” Grouios says.
Snap Send Solve is a smartphone app which allows users to report faults, hazards and make complaints directly to councils in Australia and New Zealand, as well as an increasing number of other authorities, such as utilities like water and power companies, telcos, even trolley providers.
Founder and chief executive Daniel Gorog says councils like his creation because the fact they’re funded by the ratepayers, it helps them respond to their concerns.
“Councils use it because their rate payers are using it; people want to report directly to the council, and it means you don’t have to go through the usual complaints-handling process,” he tells AutoTalk.
Gorog describes a theme with road safety complaints and concerns coming through the Snap Send Solve database.
“We have a lot of these sorts of reports, such as needs for traffic lights at school zones, pot holes, illegally parked cars, traffic problems,” he says.
“We get councils to do something about it by providing locations, photo evidence and it gets pooled with other data to build a case to resolve that issue,” Gorog explains.
Snap Send Solve, according to Gorog, works closely with councils as a kind of third-party data provider, which he says is “very popular and gets results”.
Over half a million people use the app which they say enables councils and relevant state-controlled road authorities to manage and resolve issues quicker than usual.
“Feedback tells us the vast majority of requests sent via Snap Send Sold are responded to within a faster timeframe than alternate request channels,” Gorog says.
“When they come across an incident or issue that needs attention, their priority is just to see it resolved,” he adds.
However, Snap Send Solve data shows there is an increasing trend that seems to be ignored by those same councils.
Data provided by Snap Send Solve shows in the past year almost 10,000 road reports were made to councils in Australia and almost 8000 in New Zealand – a 27% year-on-year increase.
Victoria had a 22% increase year-on-year with almost 4000 reports made in 2018.
It’s also the lead state for reports of issues, damage or faults – year-to-date around 40% of all complaints are made in Victoria, closely followed by NSW (31%) and Queensland (10%).
While Gorog reminds people where the responsibility of traffic offences lies, he says the app does aid in highlighting those community concerns.
“Speeding offences and other criminal activity should still be reported directly to police, however, we do receive reports that relate to or are the result of speeding such as broken signage, the need for signs, issues with speed bumps,” he reveals.
With the announcement of the $153 million 2018-19 budget, Manningham Council chief executive Warwick Winn and mayor Andrew Conlon both describe their ethos for the area in a similar way.
“We believe we have taken a balanced approach to providing relevant and cost-effective services and infrastructure to our community,” Conlon says on the Manningham website.
Winn says the council’s priority, “is delivering the services and infrastructure our community needs, in a cost-effective manner”.
“The key to achieving this is finding savings, ongoing efficiencies and developing new revenue sources where possible,” he adds, despite the council’s 2018 report showing a $30 million income surplus, and an accumulated surplus of $710m for the 2017-18 financial year.
Manningham spent just $6.6 million on roads in 2018 having earned over $85m in rates and $4.1m in statutory fees and fines alone.Over $52.5m was spent on council employment.
Just two blocks away, Naomi describes another back street, also a 50km/h zone, which received four large speed-restricting humps and two lane-dividing islands in recent years.
“They can twist the data and shift the responsibility however they like, but there is a horrible road safety issue being ignored here,” Naomi concludes.
“The council has lots of excuses why their income isn’t worthy of my little complaint, but ultimately something probably will happen – then the question will be how many need to be killed before something is done?”
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