Thread: 1970 Declare War On Ten Thirty Four

Originally Posted by ramblingboy42

The whole state would improve if they'd all go home.

And the Kiwis.

Originally Posted by ramblingboy42

The whole state would improve if they'd all go home.

I wish all you Qlders would stay on your side of the border and not sully our towns and beaches south of Coolangatta!
It feels like we're over run most of the time, our carparks are overful with Qld plated cars, and it seems impossible for Qld plated cars to 'Keep left unless overtaking' on any dual lane road, oh, and none seem to have functional indicators?
I suggest emergency supplies of blinker fluid be sent across the border forthwith.

Maybe I need to add this to the grumpy old man thread?

Originally Posted by JDNSW

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!

I have it in my mind that the road toll was worst in the early 1960's which brought on compulsory fitting of sear belts in new vehicles and later compulsory use of them. Does anyone have statistics from that period? Seat belts were the major contributor to the drop in road toll to the present level. The decades long campaign against drink driving and the total change of community attitude to this was also a major contributor. I can remember a Sergeant of Police saying that "you have to be pretty drunk to be unable to drive a motor car". Another major contributor to the lowering of serious injuries and deaths was the collapsible steering column. The rigid column was described by a road safety authority as "the spear aimed at the driver's heart". Exponential improvements in tyres, brakes, steering & handling, and roads all contributed.

List of motor vehicle deaths in Australia by year - Wikipedia

Deaths per vehicle have declines ever since statistics started, but by population or just the number climbed as number of vehicles per head increased until about 1969 and has been in decline ever since.

The steep drops in the early eighties and around 1990 almost certainly reflect compulsory seat belt wearing and random breath testing. I find it interesting that the widespread adoption of active safety devices in cars (e.g. air bags, ABS, ACE, etc) in the last twenty years coincide with the gradual flattening of the curve, suggesting they really have little overall effect.

Also interesting that the widespread use of mobile phones from virtually zero in 1990 to ubiquitous today (massive increase with smartphones in the early 2000s) have no discernible effect on the statistics!

Originally Posted by rick130

I wish all you Qlders would stay on your side of the border and not sully our towns and beaches south of Coolangatta!
It feels like we're over run most of the time, our carparks are overful with Qld plated cars, and it seems impossible for Qld plated cars to 'Keep left unless overtaking' on any dual lane road, oh, and none seem to have functional indicators?
I suggest emergency supplies of blinker fluid be sent across the border forthwith.

Maybe I need to add this to the grumpy old man thread?

We need to come down and spend money to keep northern NSW from sliding into recession. We'll be heading for the South Coast soon to help it recover from the bushfires.

Originally Posted by DiscoMick

We need to come down and spend money to keep northern NSW from sliding into recession. We'll be heading for the South Coast soon to help it recover from the bushfires.

Not a chance of that happening with all the Sydneysiders and Victorians here all year round!

Originally Posted by rick130

Not a chance of that happening with all the Sydneysiders and Victorians here all year round!

What about the residents with their Queensland regoed cars, to avoid annual inspections?

Originally Posted by V8Ian

What about the residents with their Queensland regoed cars, to avoid annual inspections?

Deport them I say!

Too many around here though.