Tougher policing is not the key to road safety | comment

If we truly do want safer roads then perhaps the best way to achieve this is via rules and regulations that drivers actually respect, rather than enforcing a regime viewed as unnecessarily punitive.

For that you must have laws where motorists can understand the obvious benefit (for all of us) of compliance.

In my 30-plus years behind the wheel, those road rules have evolved a lot. As a young bloke growing up in southeast Queensland, things were considerably more laissez-faire than they are today: Most of the old Holdens and Valiants we drove didn't have seat belts in the back, the blood alcohol limit was 0.08 and there was no random breath testing - unless of course you unwittingly laid some serious rubber down at the lights in sight of an unmarked walloper. Guilty as charged, sorry.

Speed cameras didn't exist, and you pretty much knew which spots the cops favoured to set up their clunky old radar sets and you slowed down for a few hundred metres accordingly.

Times have, thankfully, changed, and only an absolute arse-hat doesn't recognise the perils of drink or drug driving, or respect the fact that slowing down to 40km/h in a school zone where children are buzzing around is not only the law but basic common sense.

Likewise, it is not so much the threat of a fine that makes us buckle up as soon as we hop in a car, but force of habit born of a desire not to end up smeared all over the windscreen - the same way the 'stop revive survive" mantra is ingrained in most motorists on long journeys today.

In short, we can well understand the logic behind laws designed to minimise the carnage.

Last year four people a week on average died on Queensland roads. None of us want to become a statistic.

Where police and transport authorities lose the war, though, is when motorists perceive ever-stricter enforcement of minor infringements as being little more than revenue-raising. Instead of acting as a deterrent or an expensive lesson in improving driver behaviour, such policy merely fuels resentment and an "us and them" mindset that risks undermining public faith in other, more important road rules and safety campaigns.

Bust me hooning along the Warrego Highway at 130km/h and I'll concede I was being a bloody idiot

A case in point here is the poorly explained decision to ratchet back tolerance levels on speed cameras.

As News Corp Australia has been reporting in recent days, this has resulted in an extraordinary surge in the number of people being nicked for low-level speeding infringements - and we're talking here a few clicks over 60km/h or 80km/h on major arterial roads where a sensible motorist goes with the flow and spends more time watching the traffic than fixated on the speedometer.

Bust me hooning along the Warrego Highway at 130km/h and I'll concede I was being a bloody idiot. Hit me with a $150 fine for doing 65km/h at the bottom of a hill on Gympie Rd, Kedron, and I'll just be pissed off at the police, not pondering my own stupidity.

When pressed on the surge in "just over" speeding fines in the past year, Assistant Police Commissioner Mike Keating failed to point to any studies or concrete data showing a correlation between lower tolerance levels and fewer crashes.

Motorists could be forgiven thinking then if it's not "the vibe of the thing", then it's all about the extra millions in revenue flowing from tens of thousands of extra fines. A nice little earner in other words.

As one oft-cited US Department of Transport Study into the effects of raising or lowering posted speed limits concluded, motorists tend to drive to the conditions - optimising a safe journey with the shortest time.

People would rarely cite minor speeding as a principle annoyance or danger that needs stricter policing

The study found that lowering posted speed limits by as much 32km/h, or raising speed limits by as much as 24km/h, had little effect on motorists' speed, with drivers not altering their behaviour: "Data collected at the study sites indicated that the majority of speed limits are posted below the average speed of traffic".

In urban or most highway conditions people would rarely cite minor speeding as a principle annoyance or danger that needs stricter policing. Rather it is the sort of driver behaviour that our ubiquitous cameras can't detect upon which most motorists would support tougher action.

Cameras don't, for example, tend to detect the galahs who habitually tailgate (rendering redundant the safe stopping-distance equation of obeying a set speed limit), or the inattentive drivers who change lanes or charge into traffic with little more than a Hail Mary and a flick of the steering wheel.

Authorities need to realise there is a big difference between educating drivers, and simply alienating them

They don't target the old duffer who's never had a ticket in 50 years behind the wheel, but tows his 2-tonne caravan in the right-hand lane of the highway at 70km/h, drifting blithely across the lane markings and oblivious to the rest of the world.

When it comes to policing our roads - especially when it comes to trifling infringements that bear little demonstrable connection to safety, authorities need to realise there is a big difference between educating drivers, and simply alienating them.