Australia — Reduce Speed Limits During COVID-19
Reducing road crashes will free up ICU beds for coronavirus patients
By Stephen Coulter & Krystyna Weston
Road crashes are one of the major causes of Intensive Care Unit bed occupancy.
With every ICU bed likely to be required for coronavirus in the coming weeks/months we need to reduce the demand caused by road crashes.
Speed is the major cause of road crashes and a reduction in speed achieves three things:
1. Reduces the number of crashes
2. Reduces the severity of injuries when crashes still occur
3. Frees up ICU beds for other patients
Australia has around 40,000 hospital admissions per year from road crashes. Between 25% and 50% require ICU beds -that’s between 1,000 and 2,000 ICU beds a month which impact on coronavirus patient treatment.
A temporary reduction in speed limits will have an immediate and significant reduction in crashes.
Our proposal:
Residential Streets 30 kmh
Suburban Streets 40km
All others roads, reduce the speed limit by 20 kmh
Below are links to recent articles on this topic.
