I HEARD my mum gasp, then I was thrown forward in my seat as she hit the brake, and I briefly saw a flash of blue.
That was the colour of the station wagon that had just gone through a stop sign and crossed Seventeenth Street at speed, only just missing the Holden in which Mum was driving my little sister and I into the Mildura shops after we’d finished our school day at The Lake primary. Had we left that school half a second later, we might all have died that day.
I was very young and actually can’t remember for sure if that wagon had been travelling on Ontario Avenue, or Walnut, but I know now that our near miss was just one of countless such incidents that occur where these two well-used local roads cross the Calder Highway.
They probably would not be called “dangerous intersections” as such, because there are stop signs on those avenues and, these days, even signs warning of the stop signs, plus concrete traffic islands to make the crossroads even easier to spot, and pretty good sight lines left and right.
So, if we all drive safely all the time, they wouldn’t be a problem. The trouble is that we’re human, so we make sometimes make mistakes. When two cars are travelling 80-100km/h each and converging at right angles, a human mistake can very easily be irretrievably catastrophic.
Last week, as a Sunraysia Daily journalist, I was sent out to cover a two-car crash at the intersection of Seventeenth and Ontario and, even from 50 metres back at the police cordon, I shuddered at what I saw. It was one of the two vehicles involved about to be winched on to a tow truck, and it’s passenger side was stoved in, crushed like a soft drink can.
Remarkably, just one of the four people carried by the two vehicles involved (the other was a ute that I could not see) went to hospital for observation. That’s just incredibly fortunate.
I don’t know who, if anyone, was at fault in that collision and I won’t speculate, but I think I can say with confidence that either someone has made a simple human error, or that some circumstance, such as a medical episode, has affected their driving ability. Analysing the specific cause of this particular crash, though, is not as important as recognising that such a thing could happen to any of us, and that the consequences could be dire.
I believe very strongly that there is no such thing as a dangerous road or a dangerous intersection. Sure, there are “bad” roads and intersections because of poor design or lack of maintenance, but they only become dangerous when we don’t drive to those conditions or we fail to obey the signs, and unfortunately that is going to happen sometimes. When it happens at highway crossings, that really is dangerous.
I’ve spent much of my life away from the district and I don’t know if anyone’s been killed at the Walnut or Ontario junctions, but authorities have obviously recognised the risk because of all the extra signs erected at these spots since I was young. They clearly also recognised the same risk up the street, where Seventeenth Street meets Deakin Avenue in a merge of two highways, because they put a big roundabout there, meaning drivers have to slow down for it and really can’t miss any other vehicles that might cross their path. If some unforeseen influence does cause them to, though, everyone’s at least traveling slowly enough that collisions will have less impact.
That crash last week could easily have claimed multiple lives and, if it had, I’m pretty sure lots of people would be talking about ways to reduce the risk of something like that happening again. I’d rather not wait until someone dies, though, so I’m calling on local and other relevant road authorities to start planning new roundabouts where Seventeenth Street meets Ontario and Walnut.
For reasons beyond any logic I can fathom, there will of course be objections from the usual social-media groaners (although they rarely read this far into any story before letting fly) who seem to think roundabouts cause them some sort of inconvenience. That’s obviously ridiculous.
And the people who build roads and intersection works will say big roundabouts are expensive and that there’s already those extra warning signs.
Roundabouts are not inconvenient (indeed, they tend to improve traffic flow), and how much is a life worth?
Or the four lives that were threatened in last week’s crash, or the lives of my mum, my sister and I all those years ago.
Or the next road user who isn’t so fortunate when a simple, human mistake is made, and becomes a fatal error.
