Road Safety Statistics - Lies, Damned Lies and Advertising

Look out NZ, St Kilda Road's Advertising Agencies are about to screw you too.

The Melbourne Age, part of the great Fairfax network of media has started to lend column inches of credibility to the claim by Melbourne's Yarra Council and Vichealth that a blanket reduction in urban road speeds to 30 km/h is the next great step-change in reducing the Victorian road toll.

Now, I recently tried out what 30 km/h feels like on Port Melbourne's streets. For a start, I don't get out of 1st gear on the Suzuki. The last time vehicles did this speed there was a horse in charge of the horsepower. I average 30 km/h on my bicycle on the way to work!

Why does this matter for kiwis as well? Because NZ's last 15 years of high cost, high rotation, gore-infested TV commercials and billboards for road safety can be directly linked back to the Victorian road toll campaigns and a handful of NZ's advertising agencies that coincidentally have Head Offices in St Kilda Road, Melbourne.

Speed kills, apparently. TV adverts with splattered bodies, operating theatre gore, and terse messages of social irresponsibility have preached this for years. Gee - better spend a heap of money slowing everyone down!


But speed also generates monstrous quantities of tax revenue for the State of Victoria, notably since the threshold for exceeding the posted limit dropped to 3km/h in 2002. And speeding also generates bucket loads of money for the advertising industry of course.

Hard-hitting TV adverts with ample quantities of realistically dismembered hoons have been oft-credited with reducing the road toll attributable to speeding. And in an article titled 'How Low can we Go?' in July 10th's Age, the story continues. Just look at the graph! Bloody speeding has been killing Aussie battlers, but the great government anti-speedsters are winning the war...

Kiwi advertising agencies were quick to cut and paste the Australian commercials and the emotional justification that came with them, while the NZ authorities and politicians were equally quick to vilify speeders, rather than examine driver skill, vehicle conditions, road design and quality, alcohol abuse or other conditions somewhat more difficult to tax.

So I'd just like to point out the 3 circled statistics in the graph above.

1976: random breath testing introduced. Road toll falls precipitously.
1989: random breath testing intensified. Road toll falls precipitously, again.
2002: interlock devices for serial drink drivers introduced. Road toll falls again.

Take out those drops, and you have precisely no reduction in road toll whatsoever. Drink, drive, bloody idiot obviously did the right thing in NZ, and with those results go head, spend all the taxpayers money you like to stop idiots who think they can control a motor-vehicle under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

But speeding? Get serious. What a waste of advertising dollars over the last 15 years. As an economist and student of the use of apparently 'scientific' facts and figures to back political ends, I also refer you to the positioning of this particular callout box right next to the largest drop in road toll. At a glance, you'd be forgiven for thinking they were connected - but on close examination the text refers to a point on the line centimetres away. Dodgy graphic.

In my time back in NZ from 2004 - 2007 I had the privilege of working on an award winning TV campaign to slow down cars on roadworks, a well-researched, non-gore and glamour for R+R Communications. There was doubt then that glamorising gore with reality TV show horror was effective at changing driver behaviour. But it took bravery to pitch a 30 second TVC concept that wasn't an escapee from a Mad Max movie.

Even if the 30km/h luddites are unsuccessful in Melbourne, rest assured they'll have enough impact to ensure both countries end up driving at 40 km/h around town at some stage in the future. And won't the government love the taxation of those who go 44?