Making city centre safer

A PROPOSAL to lower the speed limit in most of the Cairns CBD makes a lot of sense.

At the moment the limit is 50km/ h in almost all streets but often people are doing 60km/h if not more.

Cairns Regional Council is considering a request from the Department of Transport and Main Roads to consider a project to improve safety for pedestrian and cyclists, including a new speed limit of 40km/h.

A DTMR study shows Spence and Abbott streets have one of the highest pedestrian and cyclist fatal and serious injury crashes of all 50km/h streets in Queensland outside Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

Nine of the top 20 50km/h streets involving pedestrian and cyclist crashes are in the Cairns CBD.

More people are walking or cycling to work in the Cairns CBD and the streets are popular with tourists and visitors who stroll to various venues including pubs and restaurants, stores, the lagoon, the aquarium and the waterfront.

The traffic volume in the CBD is such that 50km/h is hard to maintain as drivers look for empty parking spaces, make turns, and allow for double lanes turning into one outside key building sites.

A comfortable CBD will be better with vehicles travelling at a slower rate and it also reduces the risk of hitting a pedestrian or cyclist.

We should be thankful that we don’t follow a Melbourne move to slash the speed to 30km/h and reduce streets to one lane under a radical vision to drive cars out of the city centre.

Most people will accept a 40km/h limit as well as other measures to make it safer and more friendly to pedestrians and cyclists. Nick Dalton Deputy editor