Opinion: We should be paying attention, not fines

I SPENT two weeks on Indian roads in November – and, initially, a lot of it peeking between my index and middle finger, doing so many Hail Marys I was getting a repetitive stress injury.

The roads are a total circus, a mess of vehicles from huge trucks to cows to tuk-tuks and everything in between. Lanes are ignored. Horns are used more than mirrors. It is initially terrifying, but then, as you notice nobody is crashing into each other anywhere near as much as you think they should be, it becomes exciting.

There’s a system and it somehow works. Yet don’t be misled, Indian roads are dangerous, killing 150,785 people in 2016 alone.

The best Indian drivers – and the majority were excellent, aware and alert – were paying so much attention to the road and task at hand, it would be impossible for them to follow a talkback radio show or podcast. Inattention would be deadly. And it made me think.

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Image: Rolf Bruderer/Getty Images

In Australia, despite incredible advancements in vehicle safety, safer roads and barriers, lowered speed limits and, in Victoria’s case, an established hidden speed camera network, the national road toll remains largely steady year-on-year. In some cases, it’s risen – and shockingly so.

Last December saw a 25 per cent increase in fatalities compared to the December national average of the previous five years. Police were angry, and mystified. But I’m not quite sure why we keep scratching our heads.

We all want to see the road toll decrease, and it’s a huge and fiendishly complex problem to which I make no claim of being an expert, but at what point do we change tack from putting in another speed camera, or lowering another speed limit? I am personally baffled at how we ignore what is an epidemic of inattention on the roads. I see it all the time – daydreamers, wandering minds, not concentrating on the task at hand.

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In the land of automatics, people, broadly speaking, seek to expend the bare minimum mental energy operating their two-tonne projectile of metal and glass. And yet we continue to wonder why they keep driving into each other, or off the road, and killing themselves or some other poor bastard minding their own business.

Speed only increases your chance of death if you have an accident. Why are we doing literally nothing to prevent accidents from happening in the first place, when the cause is so obviously operator error? I don’t pretend to have the answer, short of abolishing lanes and letting cows wander city streets. But it would certainly have people paying more attention when they drive on Aussie roads – something in seriously short order if you ask me.