The federal government is considering lowering speed limits on unsigned roads to as low as 70 kph because even the government is finally having to admit that our country roads are not safe to drive at 100 kph.
Now, ordinary people like you and me, well, we might think that that’s proof that the government at all levels should stop wasting our money on zero emissions and start spending it on something useful like, oh, I don’t know, zero potholes. But thank God that the bureaucrats and the safety nannies and the experts are all here to set simple people like you and me straight because without them I might have never known that it has nothing to do with the fact that country roads are not car worthy. Oh no, it’s just that we can’t expect country roads to handle country cars at ordinary country speeds.
Anyway, the ABC tells us that there is an alarming death toll on unsigned rural roads. These are the ones that default to a 100 km per hour speed limit. But buried inside the article, there are some hard truths that we need to take into account. There is a lot that is also left unsaid in this article as well. Things that most definitely need to be factored in in this debate about dropping rural speed limits from 100 km an hour down to as low as 70. And before the end of this video, I’ll show you the website which has just a few days left for you to give your feedback to the government on what you think of this particular proposal.
But before we get to all of those details, first, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap in the media and make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. I don’t have any sponsors or advertisers. And whilst I probably can’t stay that way forever, I am doing my best to stay that way for as long as I can because without advertisers or sponsors to worry about, I can say whatever I believe to be true, including some hard truths like what I’ll be saying in this video about the road toll and the trade-offs of safety and efficiency on a vast continent like ours. So, if you appreciate the fact that I’m willing to say what most others won’t, then please help me to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my no-nonsense videos, then you will love my no-nonsense books, DVDs, and merch, all of which is available at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
Here’s a few facts to put our rural road toll into perspective.
The headline that you’ll see in the media is that the rural road toll is five times higher than the city road toll. And that’s true if you just look at the location of the fatalities and don’t ask yourself why. To actually understand what’s going on, you need to look deeper, and we need to look squarely at some things that are darker. First, the truth is that there is a tendency for joyriders, high-speed hooligans, to head out of the city to get their thrills on the open road, tragically leading to high-speed fatalities on freeways and country back roads. Now, this goes on to the country road toll but is in no way reflective of the safety of those roads. Rather, it’s reflective of the stupidity of those drivers.
The second point though is even darker, and that is that something like 150 to 200 people choose to end their lives by crashing on purpose at high speed, usually in country areas every year. Now, with only 1,300 road fatalities in 2024, if there’s a few hundred that happen due to idiotic hoons heading out into the country to get their thrills and another 150 or so being done on purpose out in the country where it’s easier for them to do that, you quickly realize that our road toll, well, nationally, it’s actually less than 1,000 people a year when you take out the idiots who deserve it and the people who wanted it. But also, the skew of road toll against the country is perhaps not as representative of reality.
Now that’s not to disrespect the tragedy of the road toll. I’ve spoken in past videos about the fact that yes, I have lost friends and I’ve also lost a cousin. Three times in my life, I’ve picked up the phone and been told that someone I cared about was dead. I understand the tragedy. I understand the loss. But I also understand why we still drive at high speed, why we keep driving even though we all know that it could happen to us next.
The third point we need to keep in mind is that two-thirds of the roads in Australia are unsealed roads. Australia is a big place and we don’t have the money to seal every single road, not even close. And having bureaucrats who live in the city and ride a bicycle to work making policy decisions for the people that live and work in remote areas with unsealed roads is absolutely stupid. There are 860,000 km of unsealed roads in Australia and they are all there for a purpose. They are all needed by someone. And guess what? If that someone wanted to slow down and travel at 70, they can already do that. They can slow down as much as they want. But if they choose not to slow down, well, there’s a reason for that, too. Probably the fact that they drive a car that is suited to those roads. And probably they have a long way to go.
Let’s not forget that it’s not just speed that kills. It’s crashing at speed that kills.
And one of the big reasons people crash is fatigue. Telling someone who already spends, I don’t know, hours a day behind the wheel covering long distances that they now need to slow down so that each trip takes an hour or more longer, and to tell them that in the name of safety, well, that’s nonsense. You’re just trading one cause of crashes for another cause. But what really activates my armons about this whole concept is the complete contempt that these bureaucrats have for other people’s time.
We see this all over the place in the country, but also in the city. Whether it’s taking local limits down to 50, school zones down to 40, now even 30 sometimes, or in the case of this blanket speed limit reduction in rural areas, they’re all based on the presumption that your time isn’t worth anything. “Oh, it’ll only add a few minutes to your trip.” How often have we heard that? Over and over again, adding a few minutes each time. Now, we’ll get to whether that’s even true in the case of this proposal. But even in cases where that is true, that you really are only going to need a few more minutes well, I’m sorry, bureaucrats, but those are not your minutes to waste. Those minutes belong to me and to every other road user who has just 24 hours in a day, and we’re all trying to get something done. You don’t get to be flippant with our time, with our productivity, with our life.
And that’s especially true for the lives of people whose life you clearly don’t understand, as is the case when they try and regulate country drivers. Turning a 3-hour drive into a 4-hour drive each way will be devastating for the productivity and lifestyle of the people who use these sorts of roads on a daily or weekly basis. And that’s more people than you might think. For example, I drive to Melbourne every week to record my podcast with Carly called The Oddcast. It’s 4 hours each way at 110 km an hour, and I do the trip down and back in a single day. Now that trip 8 hours on the road in one day well, that would not be viable if I was limited to 70 or 80 km an hour instead.
Now in my case, the Hume Freeway isn’t one of the roads that they’re looking at reducing, so my particular example, well, it doesn’t affect me and my week personally, but that’s beside the point because there’s lots of others, other people who do use these roads every day and every week and do long distances. And these safety nannies are simply disregarding those people’s time, adding hours to their commute, to their week, every time they have to do that trip depending on their situation adding hours to it with just the stroke of a pen as though those were their own hours to dispose of.
So, there’s that issue the in-principle fact that these bureaucrats don’t have the right to decide to waste hours of other people’s lives.
But also, in higher traffic areas, speed reductions are often counterproductive as well. We’re often told that slowing cars down during peak hour leads to more cars per minute traveling along a road. And that is demonstrably true. And that’s how engineers measure the efficiency of a road. It’s not how fast the car is going, it’s how many cars go past a given point in a minute.
But the assumption is that this increased capacity per minute automatically leads to better outcomes for motorists. But that connection is far from clear because slowing cars down also means that those cars will now be on the road for more minutes, which means that on average there will be more cars on the road at any given time during a peak hour rush. So if you improve, for example, the carrying capacity of the roads by, let’s say, 10%, the cars per minute increases by 10%, but as a result the trip duration is increased by 20%. Well, what that means is that at any given time during that peak hour rush, there’s 20% more cars on the road because the same number of people are driving that same trip, but that same trip now takes 20% longer on the road.
So that means that in fact your 10% per minute increase in efficiency the throughput through that choke point with those cars now driving slower well, it looks like it’s helping. “Oh, I can measure there’s 10% more cars going past every minute.” But actually, there’s now 20% more cars needing to get past because there’s 20% more cars now on the road at any given moment in time because they’re on the road for 20% more time. So, in actual fact, the congestion is going to get worse while the engineers pat themselves on the back for having improved the efficiency. It’s a false economy, but because speed limits and road rules are all about saving lives, we’re not allowed to question it.
The fact is that lives have a finite value. The “if it just saves one life” argument does not justify any expense. And there is a point where we’ve slowed down people so much that they’re spending so much more of their life on the road that that speed limit is now costing more lifetime than it is saving.
So, who should decide what’s the right speed for a road? Well, first and foremost, it should be the drivers. If someone has a good off-road rig with the right tires and suspension, well, they can drive on unsealed roads, no worries. And potholes, well, they’re not much of a danger to a vehicle like that. On the other hand, if you’re driving a regular car like mine, then even just the potholes on the Hume Freeway can be enough to blow a tire sidewall, which happened to me just a few weeks ago. That’s what’s left of my tire after a pothole at 110 km an hour on the Hume Freeway a road that clearly isn’t car worthy despite being one of the most important roads in the nation.
Now, people object drivers can’t be trusted to figure out their own safe speed on the open road.
And they say that without speed limits, people would be driving recklessly. And I would point out in reply that anyone who wants to be reckless is already being reckless. It’s very clear in our road toll where every year a few hundred idiots are writing themselves off at speeds well in excess of the speed limit despite the speed limit existing. The people who are currently obeying that speed limit, well, they’re not the problem and they’re not going to magically become the problem if those speed limits were lifted or eased.
The fact that the country road toll is five times higher than the city road toll is a pretty compelling argument a pretty good reason to let people get to their destinations in a timely fashion because fatigue is a much bigger factor in the country than what it is in the city. And it’s that fatigue in combination with the other factors that I mentioned earlier, plus the idiots and also of course the intentional, that make these country roads so deadly. This 70 km per hour speed limit proposal is a city solution to a country problem. It won’t work. And in fact, there’s good reasons to believe it will make things worse. And if the government really wants us to believe that they care so much about what happens on the roads, then they should start by proving that by giving us roads that are actually car worthy.
So what can you do about it? Well, the comment period on this proposal is still open for a few more days till the 10th of November. I’ll put the link in the description so that you can give them your comment before that deadline passes. My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher project and I help busy people like you to cut through the crap. I say what you’re thinking and I say it publicly so that you can share it. The fact is that these safety nannies have gone unchallenged for far too long and it’s time that we changed that. Now, if you appreciate what I’m doing with the Topher project, then please help me to keep it going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net and check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.
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