Local roads might seem a world away from the zero-death ideal of Vision Zero, but engineer Kenn Beer wants councils to imagine exactly that.
“What would a future look like free of death and serious injury?” road safety expert Kenn Beer asked delegates at the ALGA National General Assembly.
“What’s a blueprint for our network?”
As a trusted advisor to governments across Australia and New Zealand, Beer is on a mission to shift how councils approach road trauma; moving from reactive fixes to whole-of-network transformation.
It starts with the national road safety strategy, which calls on local governments to prepare network safety plans.
“We’re not looking at individual spots,” Beer said.
“We’re thinking at the whole network level of ‘how do we uplift roads and streets to be safer?’ ”
This is a pivot from crash blackspots to system design, rooted in safe system principles and biomechanics of injury.
“We need to manage crashes to within tolerable levels,” said Beer.
“Crashes will still occur and mistakes will happen. But we need to ensure they’re survivable.”
He illustrated this with a jarring analogy: falling from a multi-storey building. The impact speed from a fall is comparable to crash velocities – 40 kilometres an hour (km/h) from the second floor, 100km/h from the tenth floor.
“We wouldn’t say; ‘Just don’t drink on the balcony’ – we’d put up a railing,” Beer said.
“On the road network, very often all we have is a white line.”
Future planning, not forensic hindsight
To make real progress toward zero deaths by 2050, Beer argued for “starting in the future and working backwards.”
This means mapping out the vehicles, infrastructure, speeds, and road user behaviours expected in 2050, then testing today’s network against that vision.
Using detailed modelling developed with Austroads, Beer’s team has stress-tested local networks using 2050 scenarios.
One example: a fatality involving a 2020 Camry on a rural 100km/h road.
“We put it into the 2050 scenario and say, would that still be a fatality? If we assume a 2045 vehicle with lane keeping and fatigue detection, that crash is solved – it goes in the solved pile,” Beer said.
Other crash types, such as high-speed motorcycle incidents on windy rural roads, remain in the “residual pile” – the stubborn eight per cent of road trauma that current systems are yet to solve.
“If we have big commitment, good investment and a lot of courage from leadership, we can eliminate around 92 per cent of death and serious injury by 2050,” Beer said.
Speed, infrastructure, and strategic trade-offs
One of the most powerful levers is speed. Beer used AusRAP ratings to demonstrate how road design and speed interact: a sealed local road at 100km/h may rate just one star; drop that to 70km/h and it jumps to five stars – if compliance is assumed.
Crucially, Beer argued, councils must match speed to function.
“We need some sort of thinking around what is the strategic function of this road or street,” he said.
Whether it’s a high-speed freight corridor or a local place for people, the speed and infrastructure should reflect that role.
“We inherited a very high speed as our default mode of travel? In regional areas,” he said.
“100km/h is just very, very fast.”
Beer praised councils like the City of Greater Geelong and Mornington Peninsula Shire for grappling with these issues head-on.
Geelong is using Vision Zero as the basis for a long-term blueprint, while Mornington Peninsula has seen strong community support for reducing speed limits on rural roads.
Technology is no silver bullet
Despite promising vehicle advances from autonomous braking to alcohol detection, Beer cautioned against over-relying on technology.
“The vehicle of 2030 will do some of the speed management on its own,” he said, “but even those vehicles with all those features will still be involved in road trauma.”
He also acknowledged limitations for rural and unsealed roads.
“You put them on a dirt road without lines, and they don’t perform the same. The tech isn’t the challenge. It’s whether society is willing to accept and mandate it,” he said.
Councils in remote areas raised practical concerns – long travel times, wildlife collisions, rising use of unregulated e-bikes, and the absence of bypasses or overtaking lanes despite growing freight volumes.
“We can’t do everything on every road,” Beer said.
“But we can reduce trauma with side road treatments, sealed shoulders, and better risk mapping.”
Capability and culture
Ultimately, Beer’s biggest focus may be people.
“We’re working hard to build up local government capability and capacity around network safety planning,” he said, pointing to national and international collaborations now extending into the US.
Alongside technical planning, he urged a cultural shift.
“We have an unsafe system, and we have users with varying levels of safety and commitment,” he said.
“We need to uplift the entire system – vehicles, infrastructure, speeds, and human behaviour.”
That includes fostering a sense of self-responsibility on and around the road.
“It’s good to have safety features,” one attendee noted, “but we also need to teach kids to look before crossing.”
Beer agreed: “We need both. Technology and personal accountability must work together.”
