Have Your Say on Traffic Plan

TWO thirds of fatalities on New South Wales roads are in regional and country areas with the majority of those being people from the country and a road safety forum at the Scone RSL Club was part of a series of meetings aiming to have zero fatalities on our roads.

Staff from the Centre for Road Safety and Roads and Maritime Services listened to the Scone community last night and encouraged people who couldn’t attend to complete the online survey.

Claire Murdoch, director of strategy and policy for the Center for Road Safety presented statistics on the increasing fatality rate in the state and initiated group discussions for a 2021 plan.

“We are here tonight to listen to what the Upper Hunter region have to say about road safety and what they think we should include in our road safety plan to get us to our target by 2021,” said Ms Murdoch.

“The plan is about giving us achievable actions to get us to the 2021 target which is a 30 percent reduction in fatalities, a lot of the counter measures we are looking at will have benefits beyond that,” she said.

“The biggest thing we would like to say is the disparity between fatality rates in country areas compared to metro areas and the fact that this is where our big trauma problem is and the fact that is in fact country people dying on country roads, it’s not out-of-towners, around 70 percent of country fatalities are country people from their own local government area,” she said.

“We are wanting to speak to the community, local government, local police and anyone who has an interest in contributing to reducing trauma on our roads,” she said.

“There is an online survey where people can go online and provide comments on counter measures that we know work and also provide their input on what they think the government should be doing,” she said.

“Over the coming months we will take everything that we have got from an international review, from what other jurisdictions are doing, from the results of our community forums and our online survey and present that to the government in the next couple of months with the goal of having a new plan in November,” Claire Murdoch said.

Take the survey here to have your say.