Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight I am going to talk about the dangerous intersection of Orrong Road and Pilbara Street in the suburb of Welshpool, in my electorate. Orrong Road is a major arterial road linking the Farmer Freeway and the Roe Highway and tracks through residential, light commercial and industrial areas. Orrong Road is an extension of the Farmer Freeway and, consequently, carries a large proportion of traffic, which it fails to cope with. Since the completion of the Farmer Freeway, traffic volumes have dramatically increased on Orrong Road. One section of Orrong Road recorded a significant increase, in the order of 26,000 vehicles per week day.

Recently on ABC radio, breakfast announcer Eion Cameron, a former member for Stirling, interviewed Mr Ben Meredith, who raised the issue of the dangerous Orrong Road-Pilbara Street intersection. Mr Meredith works opposite the intersection and he and his 26 staff have seen firsthand the danger and carnage at this black spot. He said that the black spot posed a constant danger to motorists, with at least one major accident occurring every month. The most recent serious incident, on 17 September, involved a motorcyclist, who was killed.

Main Roads statistics indicate that there have been a total of 64 crashes at this intersection, with a total of 25 casualties, a result that Main Roads identify, statistically, as being higher than expected. Mr Meredith attributes these incidents to poor design at the intersection, exacerbated by poor driver awareness and traffic volume, with drivers using Pilbara Street as a short cut from Kewdale Road to Orrong Road to avoid the intersection traffic lights of those two roads.

Mr Meredith has said that, as part of his duty of care in his workplace, he has advised his 26 staff to avoid the intersection. Given the daily risk to lives, one would have thought that fixing the issue would have been an urgent priority. Black spot funding has now been allocated to this dangerous intersection, with Main Roads confirming that there will be a set of signals at the intersection. However, my office has been informed by Main Roads that work will not start on the project until mid-2009.

I will work with the local people and the new Liberal state government and, in particular, the new Minister for Transport and Disability Services, the Hon. Simon O’Brien MLC, to bring this date forward. We cannot afford to wait any longer for this vital project to start. How many more lives must be lost before we fix this problem? I am not a road expert but, if the Main Roads department is going to treat this matter with low priority, I suggest a simple pragmatic interim solution to this problem. Main Roads, or the local council, could make the south exit from Pilbara Street onto Orrong Road a ‘left in, left out only’ intersection. The barrier or the island could be shaped to still allow traffic to turn left into Pilbara Street from Orrong Road by users heading east. This may sound simple and some may say it will inconvenience all the drivers who take short cuts, but I ask them: are you prepared to risk your lives or your passengers’ lives to save a couple of minutes? We need to take a mature approach on this issue to prevent further fatalities.

In an article by journalist Adam Brockman in the Canning Times newspaper, Main Roads is quoted as saying, ‘Temporary measures to modify the intersection would affect productivity for businesses.’ I would have thought that lives at risk would take precedence over business productivity and, in my discussions with Mr Meredith, he said that most of the businesses in Pilbara Street would support a temporary measure.

Yesterday I drove through another intersection at Challenger Avenue and Manning Road, in Manning in my electorate, that had been identified as a black spot intersection. It has had a temporary barrier design put in place to reduce crashes at that intersection. The problem there is similar to the problem on Orrong Road. The intersection had been altered to make it a right turn and left turn in but only a left turn out onto Manning Road. My congratulations go to the City of South Perth and the Main Roads department for acting to save lives and making the intersection safer. I ask that the same is done for Orrong Road and Pilbara Street until they can install the traffic lights.

This is not an isolated example of road safety problems in my electorate of Swan. The seriousness of road safety problems has been steadily increasing in recent years. Since mid-2005, the number of road deaths per 100,000 population in Western Australia has risen dramatically above the national average. According to RAC WA there are over 10.5 road deaths per 100,000 population in WA, compared with the national average of above seven deaths per 1,000 and the national target, which is now below 6.5 deaths per 1,000. There have already been 142 fatalities in WA this year. These worrying statistics have not gone unnoticed by the people of WA.

The RAC WA recently undertook a survey into driver attitudes in Western Australia. RAC WA represents more than 650,000 people in WA. This is more than one in every two WA households and 50 per cent of drivers. The survey measured the issues concerning its members. The result was conclusive: the top issue concerning RAC WA members, at 34 per cent, was poor road conditions. The cost of road safety to society is enormous and road trauma is also a major public health issue. According to the Office of Road Safety, while there were just under 1,800 deaths on WA roads in the 10 years up to 2004, there were 20,000 hospitalisations. It is estimated that crashes on our roads cost the WA community more than $2.8 billion per year in associated costs. These are: $2.43 million per death, $600,000 per hospitalisation and $20,000 per medical visit.

Upgrading the roads would help to reduce WA’s societal cost by more than half. Every $1 invested in road infrastructure returns up to $5 of economic benefit, according to the CEDA infrastructure report of 2005. In WA four in every 10 fatalities are single car run-off-road accidents involving either a tree or a pole. In 2007, 63 per cent of road fatalities happened on WA’s regional road network. Given the carnage across my electorate and across Western Australia, it is important to assess, first, what is going wrong and, second, how we can improve. I want to start by considering the current federal mechanisms that have been designed to counter the road safety problem.

I spoke recently on the AusLink (National Land Transport) Amendment Bill 2008. AusLink was first established by the former coalition government in 2004 and represented the most significant change since Federation in the way the Commonwealth tackles the national transport task. I supported the continued funding for AusLink in the national land transport bill. The continuation of the Howard government’s investment in the AusLink national network is laying the foundation for a much safer interstate highway travelling environment. It is good to see that the Rudd government has decided to continue it.

It is estimated by the National Road Safety Strategy that 700 lives could be saved on Australian roads each year. Of those 700 lives, it is estimated that 40 per cent, or 332, could be saved by making our roads safer. Part of the AusLink scheme was the Roads to Recovery program. The program has allowed local councils in my electorate to plan, propose and execute local road projects. This of course leads to an upgrade of local roads which helps to improve road safety. Since its reintroduction in 1996, the Black Spot Program has saved an estimated 130 lives and prevented 6,000 serious accidents by upgrading 4,200 dangerous sites on state and local roads.

The success of these projects makes the terrible road situation in WA seem surprising. There appears to be bipartisan support for investment in our country’s road network. The statistics suggest it is succeeding. Unfortunately, the answer is that the Carpenter government, which administered these schemes, failed to properly take advantage of these policies. On speaking to members of the incoming Liberal-National government in WA, I was not surprised to learn that there had been a serious underutilisation and poor targeting of federal funding. Indeed, the RAC identify that 40 per cent of AusLink 2 allocations went towards supporting port infrastructure at Port Hedland, Bunbury, Dampier and Esperance. I agree that building future infrastructure for ports in WA is important. But I would have thought that targeting money at life-saving road projects would be imperative.

The Orrong Road intersection is another case in point. Black spot funding should have been allocated months ago by the state government. The incompetence of the Carpenter government in dealing with road safety on state roads is not good enough and the people of Western Australia deserve better. They deserve a government that values their lives and that of their families. I urge the Rudd government to use this program to work closely with the new Barnett Liberal government and direct funding into neglected areas.

In conclusion, I would like to commend Mr Ben Meredith for raising this issue in my electorate. The subsequent media coverage over the last few weeks has shown the degree of concern in the local community over this issue and the Western Australian road death issue. The road death toll in Western Australia is unacceptably high. One of the reasons for this high death toll is underutilisation and poor targeting of federal government programs, as previously stated. I will continue to work to ensure that black spot funding for Orrong Road is delivered sooner rather than later for the benefit of my constituents and road users passing through my electorate.