Doubling merit points is just sooo short sighted, what a foolish statement to make. Guess it menes the marginals will be forced off the road, lose their jobs then claim the social benefits to become a burden on society. Good thinking Eh!

Road rules should be targetted at dangerous driving, not the inavertant overspeeding of a few kms per hour on a straight peice of road somewhere purely to raise revenue.

Driver education and rational and flexible laws should be the foundation of victorian road safety. Police and the VicRoads should be targeting ‘hoon’ behaviour and dangerous driving by severly punishing exessive speeding in built up areas and during busy freeway times. On the other hand they can be flexible to drivers that may have gone over the posted limited by a few kms.

A sensible apporach (rather than a revenue focused approach) may help reduce this trangic number in the future… my 2 cents.

my call for driver education, better roads, signs and alcohol free zone!

How about a story on that rather than multiple off topic “horror road toll” articles………

I see enough of these sort of articles plastered all over the news, i dont come here to read about it.

I gritted my teeth at the last couple that were posted, but now another one???
Get back to the car reviews……(please)

Only when *everyone* starts concentrating 100% when they drive, and actually realise they are controlling a 1 – 2 tonne potential weapon and not just sitting in the lounge room, then we might reduce accidents a meaningful amount.

Given the number of drink driving and no seat belt convictions in NT, I reckon minimising the amount of time they’re on the road would greatly reduce their road toll. Give em unlimited speed limits everywhere i reckon, less time to kill themselves and others, pack of maniacs.

Considering There were 137,900 deaths registered in Australia in 2007 – only 1604 where killed on the road.

The seven priority areas that cause death in OZ are arthritis and musculoskeletal conditions, asthma, cancer control, cardiovascular health, diabetes mellitus, injury prevention and control, and mental health. In 2006, deaths associated with the seven National Health Priority Areas accounted for 77.4% of all underlying causes of death and were either associated with or the underlying cause of 90.8% of deaths.

So forget spending billions on roads, ads, more police, radar cameras ect and spend it on building some more god damn hospitals and medical research so we can save 120 000 people and not just 1 600 from road deaths.

For the reason for the higher NT crashes, it could be that some are obeying the new speed limits, while others arn’t and getting frustrated and making a stupid move to overtake.

Let us see some real evidence for all these evidence. Clearly the speed will always be a factor in any accident since speed of travel is why we all have cars. If they travel at 0km/h they would be utterly useless.

Soem small research I was able to do points that at least 3 accidents involved young drivers, and I know several pedestrians were also involved.

So
A) How is the double demerits do anything to prevent drunk pedestrians stopping in front fo cars, or bikes – Tullamarine accident with a killed motorcyclist involved a pedestrian stepping in the road in front of him, causing him to crash.

B)young drivers need training – giving them licences after pathetic parents teached them how to drive through suburban street is clearly not adequate.

I can’t fathom how hard it must be to lose a loved one in a car crash but I can’t imagine it helps if those loved ones just become government statistics. Every time I hear about an accident on the news the report almost always ends with, “…Police believe speed and alcohol are to blame….”

There’s more to these crashes than just speed and/or alcohol, although the TAC would have us believe otherwise. Clearly not everyone who is speeding is crashing their car. And clearly catching more people speeding over the holiday period hasn’t stopped these tragedies. How is double demerit’s going to help?