Banding together as a community to reduce the road death toll was the key message at the Christmas Road Safety campaign launch on Tuesday, December 5.
The Industry Road Safety Alliance South West and Road Safety Minister Michelle Roberts launched the campaign with a focus of reminding people to stay safe on the road this festive season.
“We want people to remember Christmas 2017 very fondly and not remember it with sadness in future years,” Ms Roberts said.
Ms Roberts said over the last year 232 people were killed or seriously injured on South West roads, which was more than any other region in WA.
Ms Roberts also said that it was the responsibility of everyone to keep the roads safe because it was a job that was too large for the police to handle on their own.
“If we want to reduce the road toll, it’s not just the police that can do that. We’d have to have a police officer on every 10km stretch of road and at every intersection. That is just impossible,” she said.
“What we really require is a collaborative approach, and that’s exactly what the South West Alliance provides to us here.
“Because it’s only by recognising the issue as a community and [everyone] getting behind it that we can have a successful result in terms of getting our road toll down.”
Ms Roberts also announced that the state government will increase the number of police on our roads over the holiday period to make sure the roads are as safe as possible.
“We are increasing our police enforcement efforts in addition to all of the current police officers that are allocated to road enforcement,” she said.
“We’re establishing a special regional enforcement unit, 25 additional officers that will target regional roads within a 400km radius of Perth because we know far too many crashes occur there.”
Collie-Preston MLA Mick Murray said the road safety message has particular importance for Collie, with several serious accidents occurring in recent times.
“Collie itself has been affected severely over the years, especially the years I’ve been in the political arena,” he said.
“We’ve got to take some responsibility for that. [We have to] keep telling our young people it’s not acceptable to speed, not acceptable to drink and drive because the police can only do so much, the rest is up to the community itself.
“It really does come back to the individual and family groups to make sure that we don’t have those problems.”
The event also saw the launch of the 2018 Road Safety Calendar, with the students who designed the artwork awarded for their efforts.