Drive to cut tourist toll

Call for visitors to undertake safety crash course

TOURISTS should be educated on Australian roads and conditions before getting behind the wheel of a car in our country, the nation’s peak automobile body says.

The Australian Automobile Association has called on the Federal Government to stop buck passing on road safety and fund strategies to significantly reduce our road toll like the international driver program in New Zealand.

Road crashes are costing the economy $30 billion annually, as the target to reduce road trauma by 30 per cent by 2020 looks certain to fail.

As part of the latest call to reduce road deaths, tourists would undertake an online training course “upon arrival” or even en route to the country that would run them through real-life scenarios of our roads and conditions.

Road trauma is one of the leading causes of death for international visitors.

The New Zealand course, which reaches thousands of tourists each week and came into place in 2015, asks potential drivers to pick the correct response in each scenario.

AAA chief executive Michael Bradley said: “All the figures are going in the wrong direction in terms of road trauma.”

He said the course needed to be federally funded and encouraged, but not mandatory.

Mr Bradley also said obtaining more data from crash sites – particularly on mobile phone use – needed to be another key priority.

Tourism and Transport Forum chief executive Margy Osmond said any additional hurdles for tourists would be counter-productive.

“While road safety is critically important, potentially expensive and time consuming mandatory driver education courses for international visitors could discourage tourists from exploring many parts of Australia,” Ms Osmond said.

Taxpayers and government are taking a $4 billion direct hit each year from road trauma due to lost taxation, income support and health and emergency service costs.

In the year to June 2017, there were 1241 road deaths.