Government Funding of Road Related Expenditure
Commonwealth Government Fuel Excise Revenue versus Road Related Expenditure
Last updated: April 2006
The Victorian road safety strategy relies almost completely on speed enforcement. This page is an analysis of what effect this is having, and why the Victorian Government is cynically short changing its road users.
Got a comment, feedback or useful info I could use to improve this page? Email me at victoria_road_safety@yahoo.com
Shown below is the overall road toll in Victoria, relative to Australia as a whole and NSW. Most people accept that aggregate vehicle travel is the most appropriate anchor by which to compare fatality figures:
So what does this tell us? Basically Victoria's road safety performance is roughly on a par with the rest of Australia. In fact it's slightly better, but as can be seen this is a long term trend likely resulting from factors fundamentally associated with geography/road network differences between the States.
And despite all of the rhetoric about speed enforcement being the holy grail of road safety, Victoria's road toll has been improving gradually at a similar rate to the rest of Australia, which in relative terms has a more relaxed approach to speed cameras.
Here is a TAC manager discussing Victorian drink driving in 1995:
The Country RBT program showed immediate results. Country random breath testing had been increased from some 350,000 tests in 1993 to over 700,000 tests in 1994. After just over a year in operation from early December 1993 to 31 December 1994, the accident statistics for rural Victoria had improved dramatically.
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A lot of self congratulation in there.... so let's take a look at 2006, and hear from Professor Max Cameron of Monash University as quoted in The Age:
"In recent years the Government has been focusing quite a lot on speeding-related issues, perhaps to the neglect of drink driving and random breath testing," he said. Professor Cameron said research now under way suggested that drink driving was increasing again. Although the number of deaths on country roads fell from 170 in 2004 to 155 last year, there was a big rise in the percentage of drivers killed in country areas with a blood alcohol content above 0.15 — from 12 per cent in 2004 to 25 per cent. |
Did you read that the way I did? 39 country driver deaths were over 0.15 BAC in 2005, compared to only 21 over 0.05 in 1994! Ladies and gentlemen, we have a major problem.
A quick look at road safety funding in Victoria is useful for understanding where our governments' priorities lie.
Firstly roads. Roads are primarily about enhancing transport and easing congestion, but better roads play a vital part in improving road safety. Here is how your money is spent in a nutshell.
Government Funding of Road Related Expenditure |
Commonwealth Government Fuel Excise Revenue versus Road Related Expenditure |
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Can you see the gap here? A lot less spent on roads than collected in fuel excise. Below is an attempt to summarise the Victorian situation and include some State funding as well. Spending on roads is a bit complex but here are a few of the major funding sources included. Any way you cut it, roads and your safety are being short changed..
Below is Victorian speed camera revenue. Note that it is on a par with aggregate road expenditure!
Shown above is clear and simple evidence that the victorian government collects and receives a lot of revenue from road use, but spends it elsewhere. When it comes to road safety, there is a lot of talk and attempts to blame motorists, but little action in terms of real spending on measures that are proven to work.
The reason is that the Victorian Government have spurned most of the known solutions for road safety and chosen to "bet the farm" on speeding. If you listened to the Bracks government, speeding is the answer to all your road safety problems. Yet there is little evidence in support of this claim, despite highly manipulative research that defies logic, using methods and data coming out of a virtual black box. In other words: "Trust us."
Here is a chart showing speed compliance by Victorian drivers back in the early 1990s. What you can see is that drivers were broadly complying with speed limits back in 1992. Yet through a program of installing more-and-more cameras, the Bracks government has convinced us we are getting worse and worse. It's just not true.
Link (right click and Save As to download this Adobe Acrobat report) |
This is around the time speed cameras were introduced in Victoria. Note that drivers quickly learned to slow down by 1992. The benefits for road safety are debatable, but the problem for State Government consolidated revenue are indisputable: there's much less of it.
So what happened between 1992, where you can see in the above chart drivers started slowing down, and 1999, after which speed camera revenue went through the roof? The answer is simple: Jeff Kennett and the Liberals were in power. Now the author is not a Liberal Party member, but what this illustrates perfectly is Labor's reliance on speed camera revenue. As soon as Bracks won power in 1999, speed enforcement was ramped back up again, despite the chart above showing that the original level of enforcement was basically doing the job! There is only one explanation for this: greed.
Again, this is easy. Because the Government are always under enormous budgetary pressure. The real solutions cost money, while speed cameras make money. You can fix a road, such as the major improvements to the Geelong Fwy which will save many lives over coming years, but it's expensive. And quite frankly, the Opposition will probably end up taking half the credit if they get into power.
OK so it's easy to throw mud, but what is the solution? The truth is and as stated earlier on this page, there is no single solution. The government must continue to address each issue separately through necessary expenditure on infrastructure, as well as campaigns focussing on education and appropriate enforcement.
That means getting the cops out there in rural towns with breathalysers and booze buses, fixing road problems by allocating expenditure where it counts, cracking down on fatigued and drugged truck drivers, addressing the old drivers with dementia still out there killing themselves and your kids, working on the young drivers who think they're bullet proof.
It's the tough stuff, the hard work. Not single revenue raising measures that help balance the budget.
You can read up on how the government plan to attack the road toll by downloading their strategies..
This is the Federal Government's plan to cut the road toll by 40% over this 10 year period (per population). How do they plan to do that?
Have a look at the graph.. the real gains are planned to come from expenditure on roads. But Where does speeding fit into it? Along with all the other measures aimed at drivers, which amount to 9% of the targetted 40% cut. This is not what we are told by our friends in the Victorian Government...
This is how Victoria plans to achieve the national goal set out by the ATC (above). Note the Safer Roads program, which will spend $130 million of the Transport Accident Commission's money over two years to reduce run-off-road crashes. This is on top of around $180 million in roads improvements (single year 2003/04) general roads projects funded by the State Government.
The truth is - they don't. There are real problems with understanding that causes crashes, due to:
What does contribute to road safety improvements? This issue is often much misunderstood by ordinary motorists and road safety professionals alike. The truth is: people die on the roads for a range of reasons. There is no simple solution to the problem, whether it be speed cameras as touted by governments or the often-mentioned driver education by motoring enthusiasts. In fact reductions to the road toll can be categorised in three ways:
So let's have a look at these factors, and start with cars. This is easy, as illustrated in a study by Monash University:
The chart above shows the risk of injury in a crash, according to the year of manufacture of the vehicle you're in when you have the crash. Undeniably, cars have progressively gotten safer. The question you should ask is, What effect does this have for the Victorian government's road safety performance? The answer is, it's a free kick for them. They get to claim a progressive reduction in the road toll just by sitting back and watching car manufacturers do the work.
So what about safer roads? How do they help? Safer roads reduce the road toll by removing the opportunity for severe collisions, in physical terms this means measures such as:
Fundamentally, measures such as better freeway networks have removed drivers from relatively dangerous roads and placed them onto safer freeways. The State Government can claim some credit for the capital expenditure allocated to such projects, although debacles such as the backflip by Steve Bracks to impose tolls on the Mitcham-Frankston freeway (nay tollway) are a big black mark.
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Removing drivers from this type of intersection and placing them onto... |
...freeways has road safety benefits. Discouraging them with tolls serves to erode the benefits. |
Now the interesting one... Safer Road Users. Improvements here come from:
Virtually all of these issues bar speeding have been completely ignored by the Vic Government. To help prove this, let's have a look at the drink driving debacle.