00:00Well, earlier this week, interesting research from RMIT, and the researchers said a 30-kilometre-an-hour
00:08speed limit would drastically improve safety for cyclists, and on top of that, they argue
00:13it wouldn't actually have much of an impact on drivers and driving time at all.
00:17So to chat more about it, we're joined now by Elliot Fishman from the Institute for Sensible
00:20Transport.
00:21Elliot, a very good morning to you.
00:23Morning.
00:24You're a cyclist, aren't you?
00:25So how do you feel about this?
00:26Do you think dropping the speed limit from 50 to 30 would make much of a difference?
00:30Well, I'm a motorist, I'm a public transport user, and yes, I'm also a cyclist, and the
00:35research that's been done by RMIT very much supports some of the earlier work that's been
00:40done on this issue, which has found that because the proportion of somebody's trip that takes
00:46place in residential streets is so small compared to the overall journey, it means that dropping
00:52the speed limit from 50 to 30 has no meaningful impact on the overall travel time.
00:58So it's something that would be good for cyclists, but it won't impact motorists all that much,
01:02and it'll be great for people to enjoy their home residential street and hopefully get kids
01:08out playing cricket and football out on the street on quiet residential streets, which
01:12is what happened not that long ago in Australia as a commonplace thing that just doesn't happen
01:17as much anymore, partly because of that danger and the concern that people have about road
01:22traffic injuries.
01:23Just on that, because as you rightly point out, RMIT says actually dropping the limit wouldn't
01:27really affect our travel times at all.
01:29I mean, residential streets make up a huge proportion of the Australian network.
01:33You're not at all concerned that making everyone drop their speed by double digits wouldn't slow
01:39down the network as a whole and elongate people's travel times and make things more congested?
01:44Well, you're right that residential streets make up a very large proportion of the total road
01:52network in Australia, but they don't carry all that much in terms of total traffic volume.
01:58So it's actually our arterial roads, our collector roads and our motorways that carry the vast bulk
02:04of kilometres travelled by motor vehicle in Australian cities.
02:09And they're the roads that are designed to take that traffic.
02:12So one of the great things about the sort of recommendation that was made by RMIT researchers
02:18earlier this week is that I think a lot of people know the situation when they're in an Uber
02:24or a taxi and they know the route that they would usually take to get to where they want
02:30to go.
02:30But for some reason, the driver navigation that the Uber driver is using is taking them down
02:37all these back streets. Now, if you can drop the speed limit from 50 to 30, all the in-car
02:43and mobile phone navigation software will then divert people towards those streets that are designed
02:49to carry heavy volumes of traffic and start to reduce the rat running that can often happen on
02:54residential streets, which really makes the street much less livable than it would be otherwise.
02:58That makes me want to ask about the change in the speed limit when it comes to e-bikes, right?
03:02Electric bikes are now everywhere, particularly with delivery drivers. Should they be included
03:07in this? Because I'm pretty sure a lot of them do go faster than 30 kilometres an hour,
03:12but you don't need a licence, you don't need registration, you can just hop on one and go.
03:17Yeah, look, that's a really good point. They should be included in this. All road users should
03:22be included in this. So that could be an ordinary bike, a racing bike and somebody riding down
03:28the street at 45 kilometres an hour, that would be considered too fast. So the 30 would apply to
03:33all road users. And for those e-bikes that do exceed that 30 kilometre an hour limit, they're
03:40actually not e-bikes, they're unregistered motorcycles. So to be an e-bike in Australia,
03:46the motor needs to cut out at 25 kilometres an hour. Anything faster than that, then that is an
03:53illegal motorbike. It needs to be registered. We're almost out of time, but I just want to finally
03:57ask you, obviously, no one's disagreeing. We want to make our roads safer. God forbid someone is hit
04:03on the road. How much of a difference does that 20 kilometre change make in terms of impact if someone
04:11is actually hit? Yeah, it actually makes a really big difference. So to illustrate that, if somebody is
04:19hit by a car going at 50 kilometres an hour, there's only a 15% chance that that person will survive
04:27that collision. Whereas if the vehicle is going 30 kilometres an hour, there's actually a 90% chance
04:33of survival. So it's a really big difference. It's a non-linear relationship. So a small drop in speed
04:39has a big difference in terms of safety. And we all want much safer streets and reduce the chances of
04:46anyone on the road suffering a serious injury or dying.
Comments