Blanket speed limit reductions not the answer to reducing the road toll

A proposal for a default speed limit reduction on country roads from 100 km/h to 80 km/h is a cheap and easy option to try and reduce the road toll, says Shadow Minister for Rural Roads Roma Britnell.

This issue cannot have a one-size fits all approach. Speed limit reductions should not be the first option when it comes to addressing the rising road toll.

Improving road surfaces and increasing safety features on high-risk sections of roads where accidents are happening would be a much better tactic to take.

Simply slowing people down while failing to properly address the underlying safety issues like potholed and warped surfaces is lazy policy.

Labor has been in government in Victoria for all but four of the past 20 years – they have overseen a continued degradation of the rural road network and have failed to appropriately manage and maintain it.

And it’s only going to get worse, with Labor using money for road maintenance to fix damaged wire rope barriers, reducing spending on rural road upgrade projects by $220 million and taking $2 billion out of the TAC to prop up their mismanaged state budget.

This is a government that is being tempted to take the easy option, to slow people down rather than actually fix the roads.

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