Road accidents, accident databases, and is your rear covered?

Elsewhere the legal system shows signs of getting out of hand in the awarding of compensation to accident victims and in the matter of legal liability claims against road authorities. These trends are emerging here. The answer to these excesses may well be a form of no fault public liability insurance. Even so, part of the road engineer's job will continue to be to ensure that, for the funds society gives him, the least possible amount of injury and damage arises as the result of use of the road system. He must adopt defensible practices, and (at least for the present) be able to demonstrate in a court of law that he has done so. Courts accept that every hazard can't be removed; but they won't accept the mere reinstatement of a roadside item where there has been an ongoing accident history. But how can the road engineer know the accident history without an accident database? rural accident data base developments within main roads are described. The paper raises the issue of appropriate accident databases for undeclared rural roads and for all roads in urban areas; it also examines the pros and cons of decentralised vs centralised approaches to accident databases. The paper seeks to identify a way of resolving these issues and progressing accident database developments in Queensland (a).