Speed reduction

magine promoting smoking as a healthy pastime. Or saying that a gambling addiction is ‘just a bit of fun’. Or that bad relationships with alcohol aren’t a big deal, even in teenagers. It’d be shocking, right? Totally unacceptable. So why does one in five of us think that speeding is okay? Speeding is the everyday crime of the law-abiding.

You might be on the fence. And you might think that speeding isn’t a problem because most of us think driving a bit over the speed limit is fine. We think: “we do it every day, we’re good drivers, we know we can handle the conditions, we know the roads… speeding isn’t in the same category as smoking, gambling addiction or alcoholism.”

The comparison is unfair.

Speeding accounts for one in three deaths on our roads. Road trauma is the second biggest killer of young Tasmanians aged 17–25. On average, between 2011 and 2020 in Tasmania, 32 people died and 269 were seriously injured on our roads each year. So why aren’t we slowing down?

These are sobering facts. But if you think about it, you don’t really need them. It’s a simple matter of physics: the faster you go, the harder you crash, and the more damage you do.

More people are speeding than ever before, which is driving up the average speed on our roads. Make no mistake, these findings

are linked. There are more than 100 studies, national and international, that prove that when average speeds increase, so too do serious casualties. It’s not enough to just survive. Hundreds of people are living with injuries that have changed their lives forever. All because we’re running late, or we’re keeping up with the general flow of traffic, or it’s just a bit of fun. The truth is, speeding kills. And it’s something we’re all doing. We all go a little over every now and then. But it could cost us – and others – our lives. But here’s the good news. By driving even just a 1% reduction in a bit slower, we can make a huge difference average speed on our to our road toll. For example, a 1% reduction roads creates a 4% in average speed on our roads creates a 4% decrease in deaths. decrease in deaths. And it’s not like it’s a tricky thing for us to do – we just need to drive within the speed limit. That’s why the Road Safety Advisory Council’s latest campaign, Over is Over, is a call for social responsibility. We need to rethink our attitudes to speed and change our behaviour. Because as it is, we’re normalising our actions, and passing on dangerous habits to our children. We need to stop driving over the speed limit. We need to look after ourselves, and each other. It doesn’t matter if you’re speeding by 15km/h or 4km/h because driving even a few kilometres over the speed limit is still over the speed limit.