Millions of drivers warned as change to average speed cameras becomes official
Road safety advocates have long called for average speed cameras to target all cars – and NSW Roads Minister John Graham has now made it official.
Speeding is about to get a whole lot harder.
A new trial set to begin in Australia's largest jurisdiction means the use of point-to-point cameras which track the average speed of vehicles will be dramatically expanded to nab ordinary drivers doing the wrong thing.
Currently, the technology has almost exclusively been used to monitor truck drivers but NSW has announced it will no longer be a global outlier on point-to-point speed detection and its heavy-vehicles-only policy.
Cars will now be subject to the average speed monitoring during a trial along two stretches of highway where six people have died in recent years.
All other mainland Australian states and countries like the UK, Norway, Italy and the Netherlands had found average speed cameras to be effective, Roads Minister John Graham said on Sunday when officially announcing the change.
"We aim to be as rigorous as possible to be sure they will also reduce road trauma in NSW," he said.
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Legislation will be required to set up the trial, which will begin along a 15-kilometre stretch of the Pacific Highway between Kew and Lake Innes on the mid-north coast and a similar length of the Hume Highway, north of Gundagai.
However there will be a short grace period meaning drivers who are caught speeding won't be immediately fined. Offending motorists will instead receive written warnings for the first 60 days before financial and licence penalties then kick in.
In February, Yahoo reported the NSW government was mulling the change. "The government will look at the evidence here ... We're not putting a position today about any individual action that we need to take," Graham said at the time, about the government's plans to tackle rising road fatalities.
However the change was made official on Sunday.
Sydney's 37 existing point-to-point camera systems (seen here on a state map) range from the Sydney Harbour Tunnel and the city's ring of tollways to a 94km stretch of the Newell Highway in the state's west. At least for now, the vast majority will continue to be used solely for trucks but it's likely they too will soon be used to monitor the more than 7 million registered vehicles that take to the state's roads each year.
Any future decision to make the trial permanent, or roll it out to NSW's 35 other average-speed zones, will also require parliament's approval.
The measure was one of several recommended outcomes from a road safety forum in Sydney in April involving 155 experts. Road safety advocates also called for an end to warning signs on approach to fixed and mobile speed cameras – however no changes have been announced on that.
In 2023, speeding contributed to 44 per cent of road deaths in NSW, three-quarters of which were in regional NSW.
with AAP
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