Part · What Actually Works

The fixes that don't fill a revenue fund.

Criticism is easy; here's the constructive half. The interventions that actually cut road deaths are well-evidenced — and they share one feature: they're boring, un-billable, and design-based. Nobody gets a fine. Which is precisely why they're not the priority.

Design the danger out of the road

The single biggest, most replicated win in road safety isn't a camera — it's a shape. Replace a signalised intersection with a roundabout and the severe crashes largely vanish.

Signalised intersection

32 conflict points — including 16 crossing points that produce high-speed T-bones. Relies on drivers obeying a light; permits full-speed crossing; breeds red-light running (>1,000 US deaths/yr).

Roundabout

8 conflict points, zero crossing conflicts. Forces every driver to slow to ~15–30 km/h and look. Injury crashes down 72–80%; fatal/serious down up to ~90%.

That's not a rounding error — it's the difference between a fender-bender and a funeral. The FHWA estimates converting just 10% of America's signalised intersections would have prevented tens of thousands of crashes in a single year. Traffic lights don't make drivers safe; they make drivers obedient — staring at a bulb instead of assessing the road.

Sources: IIHS — Roundabouts; FHWA Roundabouts Informational Guide (conflict points); IIHS — Red-light running. The "lights breed obedience not awareness" point is an engineering argument (aligned with the self-explaining-roads work below), not a single measured statistic.

Self-explaining roads: trust drivers, and they pay attention

The counter-intuitive frontier: sometimes removing signs, lights and markings makes roads safer. The Dutch engineer Hans Monderman pioneered "shared space" — strip out the false certainty of traffic control and drivers, no longer on autopilot, slow down and negotiate by eye contact.

At the Laweiplein in Drachten, after the lights were removed: collisions fell from roughly 30 (with several injuries) over seven years to about 4 collisions and no injuries in the two years after. — shared-space redesign, Drachten, Netherlands

The mechanism is deliberate: a driver told exactly what to do stops thinking; a driver made responsible starts. contested — this works best on low-speed, low-volume urban streets, raises real accessibility concerns for blind and disabled pedestrians, and isn't a drop-in replacement for busy highways. But it proves the deeper point: attention and good design beat surveillance and punishment.

Source: Shared space / Hans Monderman (with criticisms); Project for Public Spaces.

Fix the roads where people actually die

Remember: ~two-thirds of Australian deaths are on rural roads (see The Goldmines) — run-off-road and head-on crashes no urban camera can touch. The fixes are un-glamorous, passive, always-on engineering:

These are the FHWA's "Proven Safety Countermeasures" — quantified, replicated, and they don't rely on catching anyone. A dollar spent on a median barrier on a country highway saves more lives than a dollar spent on a camera at the bottom of a city hill. The budgets say which one governments prefer.

Sources: FHWA — Rumble strips; FHWA Proven Safety Countermeasures.

Make better drivers — not more fined drivers

Here's where the intuition ("just teach people to drive properly") is right — but only if you do it the hard way. The evidence is blunt about the easy way.

Bolting a driver-ed class onto high school does NOT reduce crashes — and can make things worse. The landmark randomised DeKalb County study and the Cochrane systematic review both found that school driver-ed mainly gets teens licensed earlier, increasing their road exposure, so any skills gain is cancelled out. Cochrane's words: it provides "no evidence that driver education reduces road crash involvement" and "may… increase the proportion of teenagers involved in traffic crashes."

What does work is rigour and structure, applied early and seriously:

The lesson the exposé keeps hitting: spend the effort up front making genuinely competent, attentive drivers and building forgiving roads — instead of licensing people cheaply, then harvesting them with cameras and calling the fines "safety."

Sources: Cochrane — school driver education; DeKalb County study; IIHS — graduated licensing; Finland multi-phase licensing. Honesty note: generic driver-ed evidence is strongly negative; graduated licensing is strongly positive; hazard-perception training (vs testing) is mixed — we've labelled each.

The countries that lead do it by design, not by fines

Norway has the lowest road-death rate in the world — about 1.6 per 100,000 people (87 deaths in 2024). Sweden, birthplace of Vision Zero, cut its toll by more than half. They didn't get there by hiding cameras and indexing fines. They got there by engineering the system so a human mistake doesn't cost a life — safe speeds built into the road, separated traffic, forgiving roadsides, rigorous licensing, safe vehicles.

Yes, this is "Vision Zero" — the real one Elsewhere on this site we criticise "Vision Zero" — but as a marketing slogan used to justify ever-more enforcement and revenue (see The Strategy). The Nordic original is a different animal: an engineering and design philosophy that shifts responsibility onto the people who build the system, not the individual to be fined. Australia adopted the logo and the enforcement; it skipped the expensive design work. That's why its toll is rising while Norway's falls.

Sources: ITF/OECD — Norway (2025); WEF — Sweden's Vision Zero.

The whole argument, in one line

We know what saves lives — roundabouts, median barriers, rumble strips, graduated licensing, honest speed limits, and drivers taught properly. None of it issues a fine, fills a revenue fund, or logs your movements. The tragedy isn't that we don't know the answer. It's that the answer doesn't pay.

Ready to push back? The Take Action page has FOI templates and how to challenge a fine.