Firstly let me say I appreciate your effort in commenting. The reference to sign research is particularly useful.

Grade separation has always been a political decision which is why in Victoria, there are so few. I can\’t dispute the VicRoads costs but the estimates, and I have heard different ones in recent Parliamentary Committee meetings on the issue, need to acknowledge that the construction costs should have been spread over decades, if the political will and foresight had been applied, as it has been in other Australian States.

I accept your point on the adequacy of most metropolitan crossing signage and barriers and will use my local crossing as an example of political shortsightedness (another case of not seeing the signs). The level crossing has boom gates that only block one half of the road thereby allowing plenty of space for a driver to choose to drive around the barriers and proceed, which I have seen many drivers do. From OHS principles, the barriers should have extended across the entire road because effectively most Victorian level crossing have \”half a guard\” and we know from machine guarding that any barrier that can be easily bypassed is next to useless.

Bring back manually-operated barrier gates, they looked lovely, provided employment and covered the road in both directions.

I think road safety has some, specific correlation with OH&S principles. And I\’ve seen research on road safety that could quite possibly teach us some important stuff about workplace safety.

The most common road safety issue I use is to assure punters that they do risk assessments very quickly while driving. All the core elements of informing, training, experience and engineering issues are a factor when making lots of safety decisions while driving. That\’s not to say there is a tight fit with workplace safety, but I think it does help demystify day-to-day risk assessments.

Clearly, this isn\’t applicable to complex safety issues, but a good fit with the more contemporary idea that exhaustive deliberation on a safety issue that has a bleedingly obvious solution is a silly waste of time – and puts people unnecessarily at risk when the fix can be quick.

On the benefits of road safety research for OH&S, I saw an excellent bit of research on how people react to road safety signs. I\’d found that when I was doing an e-newsletter for a safety equipment distributor. The paper I found was on the Australian Transport Safety Bureau web site and is called \”Signs of trouble to come? A behavioural assessment of the effectiveness of road signs\”by Adams et al. Here is the URL to find the paper: http://tinyurl.com/m2ps7u

The research seemed to suggest that a sign has more impact if people know why a safety sign is in place, but I thought the really interesting bit was the paper mentioning how other research had suggested that the viewer of a road sign makes a judgement about the probability of them being hurt if they don\’t take account of the sign. Even more interestingly was the suggestion that the probability of being injured seems to be more important than what will happen if they don\’t obey a sign.

For mine that\’s an example of how road safety research and issues could well have big implications for work safety. Look how often we will see explanations of what will happen if something dangerous is done. And look how rare it is to find stuff on how likely it is an injury will happen. And I should add I\’m not talking about when we dig deep into OH&S research to find probability of injury: I\’m talking about the typically available material, the stuff the punter is readily able to get hold of. It seems reasonable to suggest there\’s lessons here for OH&S advice – up to including that we may be getting it wrong by not giving the punter easily digested information on how likely it is they will be injured.

I\’d also suggest that this stuff on how individuals respond to road signs is something that is equally important for finding the triggers to make an employer understand the need to control risks, as it is for the individual to understand the need to participate in safe work practices.

On the issue of \”grading separation\” at rail crossings, I\’d suggest that once there is law, flashing lights, and boom gates you\’d reasonably expect that sufficient has been done to keep the road user safe. I\’d also suggest that we could all come up with lots of options for excellent safety \”bang for the buck\” with the billions that providing grading separation for all rail crossings would cost. From the VicRoads site I get the idea that a \”typical\” railway overpass bridge costs about $30,000,000. That\’s about the price of 15 railway crossings with lights and boom gates (if me arithmetic is right!).

When I see flashing lights, bells ringing and a dirty big lump of wood get dropped in front of me, I think I get the message loud and clear. Sure an overpass bridge eliminates the railway crossing hazard, and saves me that precious couple of minutes through not having to stop at a boom gate. But those advantages will invariably mean that there will be a rail crossing somewhere out in the bush is waiting for the money to be found to put in some useful engineering controls. Sure cost ain\’t everything when it comes to working out what is reasonably practicable. But can we sensibly say that flashing lights, bells and a boom gate isn\’t a practicable way to control the risk?