The Australian Trucking Association (ATA) has issued a warning to governments around the country to leave rural speed limits alone in their bids to improve road safety.
Instead, ATA chair Mark Parry is calling for governments to improve safety by fixing black spots and spending more on road upgrades and maintenance.
This call was part of an ATA submission to the federal government infrastructure department’s consultation paper on reducing default speed limits outside built-up areas.
This consultation paper included a preferred option of reducing the speed limit to 80km/h where there are no speed signs.
Parry says there are more effective ways to improve road safety around the country.
“According to the consultation paper, reducing speed limits would generate $2.20 in benefits for every dollar it would cost,” he says.
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“For the same dollar, we could get $9.60 in benefits by placing more warning signs at dangerous locations on rural roads or $6.60 in benefits through line marking.”
He says the federal government should spend more on road upgrades and maintenance.
“Maintaining non-urban roads better and upgrading them would support the industry’s productivity, reduce maintenance costs and improve the resilience of the road system as Australia’s climate gets worse,” he says.
He says the productivity impact of reducing the speed limit would be significant and was understated in the paper.
“After the consultation paper was published, a Sydney Morning Herald story noted that the reduction would increase the length of a 30 minute transit by around the duration of a Taylor Swift track,” he says.
“There aren’t many 30 minute transits on non-signed roads in rural and remote Australia. In any case, truck drivers work all day, not just for half an hour.”
The submission points out that the cost modelling in the paper assumes that truck driver wages haven’t increased in real terms since 2013 and uses a 9.25 per cent superannuation rate instead of the current rate of 12 per cent. It also bases the cost of increased freight travel times on a survey that looked at the cost of inter-capital and metropolitan freight, not rural freight.
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