A week out from Christmas and a Bendigo family’s celebrations will have been shattered by the loss of a daughter and friend in a car crash early on Monday morning. They will join other families who have lost loved ones on our roads. They all mourn that special somebody who won’t be there to open presents and share in the joy of this and future festive seasons.
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It’s an all too familiar scenario. Year after year the people we love have left us too soon in road crashes.
And, too often, it was not their fault.
Drivers drinking, taking drugs, speeding, taking their eyes off the road while distracted – by radios, texts, others in the car, eating – are all culprits. Throw in kangaroos, roadside hazards (trees, poles) and tiredness and you have a recipe for a potential disaster.
It is a war we don’t seem to be getting closer to winning – when one battlefront is largely won (say, seatbelts) another opens up (drugs).
The road toll in rural areas is such that La Trobe University in Bendigo has indicated it wants to set up a project to find ways to halt the spiral, which is higher in the country where we travel faster, further and on roads with which we are over familiar.
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Later this week the Christmas holiday exodus will start. People will be travelling to family and friends or to holiday spots around our great country. The journeys may be long. They may start late at night, or in the early morning, when you are not at your most alert.
You may push on when tiredness and hunger are telling you to stop.
You may be distracted by the children chanting in the back with the ever-annoying refrain: “Are we there yet.”
You may leave too little time to get to your final destination and so increase your speed – with the risk of a very different final destination than the one intended.
You won’t be the only one pushing the limits. And when something unexpected happens, the unthinkable can happen. People don’t come home. This Christmas drive to survive. Make it to 2019.
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