The (acting) Queensland Liaison Officer of the National Motorists Association Australia Inc. today blasted new 'road safety' ads which warn that tiny breaches of current speed limits are necessarily dangerous. The ads depict trivial excesses of the speed limit as being dangerous due to dramatic increases in braking distance.

Mr Goeldner said that the focus of the road safety ads seemed to be driven more by a profit motive than a real desire to promote road safety. "There are so many problems with the ad campaign it is difficult to know where to begin" he said. "The whole idea that you can predict crashes simply from braking distances is fundamentally flawed. If there were no steering wheels and most drivers didn't swerve if at all possible to avoid a collision it might hold more weight. However it has long been known that speed difference from the flow of traffic is a much better predictor of crash risk than speed difference from an arbitrary number painted on a sign." he argued.

He further said: "Comparing Queensland Transport braking distances with those published in magazine road tests has always created a suspicion that the distances have been inflated to justify speeding tickets. However the fact that car stopping distances at 60kph have gone up 22m and at 70kph 28m since 1997 means that something isn't right. This increase is inexplicable when ABS brakes are increasingly standard."

Speed	Old	Current
60kph	34m	56m
70kph	43m	71m

Mr Goeldner said that his organisation doesn't support speeding per se but there is a big difference between discouraging reckless speeding and TV ads focusing on minor breaches of the speed limit. "We object to public money used to promulgate misinformation to make excuses for revenue raising. We also require a broad approach to road safety which targets the real road safety problems. It is easy and lucrative to target mainly small breaches of speed limits but this fails to effectively address most of the causes of road accidents".

"In the last 5 years 1653 Queenslanders have lost their lives on the road. Eighty five percent of these deaths didn't even have speeding as a contributing factor. Threfore a preoccupation with speeding wastes resources which could have saved many lives if they were applied to more significant causes of crashes."

"Our position is that simply providing more reasonable speed limits would be a better approach to make motorists take the limits seriously than TV ads with misinformation." He said.