Thread: 1970 Declare War On Ten Thirty Four

Who remembers back when the Victorian Road Toll was over one thousand deaths per year and other states were showing similar trends?
It was the days of the Ford Falcon GT-HO, 350 Monaros, GTR XU-1 Toranas, E49 Chargers, very few cars had seat belts, no roadside random breath testing, etc., etc.
At the time I was attending the Red Cliffs High School up in the North West corner of Victoria.
The 1969 Victorian Road Toll reached 1034 and in early 1970 a creative thinking Red Cliffs High School Teacher, John Nicholls, came up with the idea of showing Victorians what one thousand and thirty four human beings all laying on the road surface looked like. The main street of Red Cliffs was selected for the exercise, and to make up the numbers other schools in the Red Cliffs area were invited to participate. The event proved a big hit and it received a lot of media coverage.
The slogan at the time was "Declare War On Ten Thirty Four" (1034)

In the same year (1970) Victoria introduced the compulsory wearing of seat belts and within fourteen months all the other Australian States followed.
Approximately two years later after a front page story of The Sun newspaper the Federal Government "convinced" the "Big Three" motor vehicle manufacturers, Holden, Ford, and Chrysler to cease making high speed race performance cars. Ford had just released it's 1972 XA GT-HO Phase IV, but after only producing four vehicles, production of the GT-HO Phase IV ceased.

Originally Posted by 87County

In NSW the road toll peaked at about 29 per 100,000 head of population in 1970, several initiatives including RBTs, compulsory seatbelts, graduated licences, & speed cameras slowly followed, and now with more active protections being built into modern motor cars that 1970 rate/100,000 has been gradually reduced by about 85% (may even be closer to 90%).

Not bad- but any road death is one too many and the self managed suicides will always be a problem.

I'm not sure what driverless cars will do to this or even where we will be able (allowed) to go in them.

BTW, I too had fitted seat belts to my vehicles from 1961 when the only place you could purchase them was from a crowd in Chippendale who made aircraft seat belts (lap, sash or full harness - no inertia reels back then). "Touch wood" I have never been in a situation where they were required but I know that it can happen at any time without warning.

While active protection in modern cars undoubtedly have some effect, in my view this is overrated as a reason for the dropping road toll. Statistical data compiled by Monash shows no discernible relation between safety features of modern cars and safety outcomes when you look at overall statistics. If you look at, for example, survival in specific types of accidents, yes, but when you include the accident frequency, the correlation is lost.

In my view the major reasons for improvements (apart from seat belts and random breath tests, which did show up in statistics) are a steadily improving safety culture - for example, in 1970, someone booked for drink driving was considered unlucky - today they are considered a fool at best by most people. (Still a lot of room for improvement!), and vastly improved roads. You only have to look at the accident rates per vehicle - kilometre for divided roads compared to undivided roads, despite the generally higher speed limits on divided roads to see the vast difference road construction can make.

And even without these expensive changes, I look back and see a lot of minor improvements that add up - for example, edge marking, rumble strips, offsetting country crossroads, improving corners, better safety railings, replacing single lane bridges, that sort of thing.

I also had seat belts from that place in Chippendale - Light Aircraft Supplies, or something like that, from memory.

Driverless cars are, I suspect, a long way off, if ever. One almost insuperable problem is the legal framework, but another is that ordinary drivers are actually very good at decision making - drivers make tens of thousands of decisions every day, and the accident statistics show that a very, very, large proportion of these are made correctly. The "getting it right" decision rate for human drivers, it seems, is greater than the rate of fault-free performance achieved from any type of software.

For self driving software to be accepted as reaching the level of reliability of a human driver, it is going to have to be tested in a very large number of different circumstances. (Tesla in fact are doing this, as the main reason their cars call home!) But then the software (and the hardware supporting it) must be protected in some secure way from change or modification without a similar rigorous testing regime being applied to the modifications.

I am sure some will point out that this has been done successfully in airliners. Two points - aviation "self driving" is a far simpler problem than driving on the road, and airliners cost tens of thousands of times more than do cars, so have much more effort put into their design. And even then, think Boeing MCAS!