Safe System or Stalinist System?

In this in-depth critique Robert (Rob) Morgan pulls apart Australia’s phoney wonder-solution to the road toll — the Safe System.

The Safe System is the cornerstone of every state and territory road safety strategy. It promises to eliminate all death and serious injury from our roads. But as Rob Morgan explains from his own and others’ extensive experience, not only is this impossible but pursuing it will actually leave our roads with more deaths and serious injuries.

Well established, effective, science-based ways to reduce our road toll have been swept aside by the wild claims of the Safe System that ‘zero is possible’. Incredibly, the Safe System deals with only one percent of crashes and ignores why road users make the mistakes that lead to crashes.

Instead of focussing enforcement effort on the problem minority, the Safe System is about a Stalin-like control of the masses, through lower and lower speed limits. Never mind about mobility, the environment, freedoms or simply getting to work — for Safe System advocates, road safety is everything. Nothing else matters.

Stalin had his extensive network of unseen secret police. The Safe System has its extensive network of unseen automated speed cameras. Too bad our roads will be no safer.

This book draws parallels between the utopian claims of the Communist Manifesto and the utopian claims of what the Safe System will achieve.

Drawing together his understanding of what works, Rob Morgan puts forward an effective alternative that will reduce the road toll - a new Safety Star System. This includes consideration of road user behaviour aspects, which the Safe System ignores.