In the Australian State of Victoria a long trend of decreasing accident rates turned into negative figures in the late 1980s. Three government co-operated to form a new road safety strategy, later known as the Victorian model The Victoria model itself extends well beyond a focus on enforcement and certainly well beyond speed management by traffic cameras. However, that technology supported by public awareness campaigns does constitute about 50 percent of the infringement transactions in one of the two offences identified as most critical, i.e. excessive speed. The paper presents the strategy and its main components. The best results in recent years for the Victoria model in terms of the annual rate of improvement were in the early 1990s. After that, the lower numbers of road deaths more or less held at that level. At 396 road deaths in 1992, there had been a reduction of 49 per cent in the road toll in the three years between December 1989 and December 1992. Five things that worked well were: 1) the rapid reduction in the number of deaths from road crashes and, albeit a lesser, reduction in injuries won community support for the road safety program and assured that politicians would continue allocating resources to it; 2) the development of a comprehensive road safety strategy in which the speed camera program was an important part; 3) the presence of a commercially focused government agency as an investor in road safety; 4) implementation of high volume enforcement; and 5) an efficient court system support.
Samenvatting