Feature - Upfront
Dave Cliff
by Amanda Spratt
National Road Policing Manager.
He admits he might not be able to tell you the model of a car – he describes vehicles by their colour – but national road policing manager Superintendent Dave Cliff is passionate about the country’s driving habits. When he started, policing the roads was “like working in the killing fields”, and in 20-plus years he’s heard all the excuses (“I’ve just had two drinks, honest”) and tricks (no, drinking water will not dilute your blood-alcohol level). It’s frustrating, often gruesome work, but it’s worth it: the road toll has halved since then – and, he says, we can do better still.
Do you remember the first accident you attended? The first one I went to was a bloke in his mid-forties who was on his way to church and was struck on a pedestrian crossing in front of his family and the congregation. It was a drunk driver. In the next, a trailer going downhill came off, crossed the road and impaled a woman coming the other way, killing her instantly, and pinning her teenage daughter next to her dead mother. These are horrendous sights for a 20-year-old kid and they left a lasting impression of how needless they are.
So, what kind of drivers are we, as a nation? We are quite aggressive, on an international scale. It comes from our environment: we have an extremely low population, we’ve got an incredibly large road network and we have it in our heads that we can travel unimpeded as fast as we like. The young ones rationalise it in an odd way. They think their boy-racer friend gets killed because he’s not as good a driver as them. You and I might think that’s just stupid, but unfortunately the male mentality is that they’re a better driver.
And are they? Men are worse drivers than women. Women don’t die at the same rate, they don’t kill other people at the same rate, they aren’t interested in going faster and all the statistics bear that out. Within the female psyche there’s more recognition of risk.
What’s the main killer on our roads? Excessive speed. Human bodies haven’t developed much since the caveman days. The largest impact we had to sustain was falling out of a tree, and that was at about 30kph. Once a human body hits an object at speeds higher than that, the chances of the body surviving diminish. At 70kph, your chances of survival are pretty much zero. Your brain stem snaps, your organs rupture when they strike the ribs, the aorta rips away from the heart. The forces involved are enormous. I’ve been to fatals where the unrestrained passenger in the back seat has come through the front of the car, broken the neck of the front-seat passenger, and continued on through the window. They killed the front-seat passenger. If they had their seatbelt on, they would have both had a bit of bruising.
Do you get frustrated with people who ignore the rules? It gets tiresome. The most frustrating thing is mothers holding new babies on their lap in the front seat. You ask them what they’d do if they crashed, and they say they’d just hold on. And you think, you stupid, stupid person. The baby would go through the windscreen like a projectile and be killed.
You say your proposal to lower breath- and blood-alcohol limits will save 14 lives on the roads. But will it really target those heavy drinkers who cause most of the accidents? Yes. It’s counter-intuitive, but the evidence out of Australia is very clear: when you reduce the level from 80mg (of alcohol per 100ml of blood) down to 50mg, it has the greatest effect on pulling down those with very high levels. It stops them drinking earlier. But even at the current level or just below it, someone’s at eight times the risk of involvement in a fatal crash than if they’re sober.
The guidelines – four standard drinks in the first hour and one every hour after that – do seem generous. You would be amazed at how much alcohol it would take to get you over the current limit. Follow the guidelines and you’ll stay well under the limit. But we can all do a little better than that. If you’re sitting in a 737 on the tarmac waiting to take off, and the air hostess announces your pilot has been breath-tested and he’s just below the legal driving limit, I don’t think there’d be a single person left in their seat.
Are there any lighter moments? Caught anything funny on a speed camera? We once got a snail crawling across the lens.
Speaking of speed cameras, what do you say to those who claim they’re just for revenue gathering? Someone suggesting to me that I come to work to make money for the government and it doesn’t have any safety benefits is really offensive. I didn’t join the Inland Revenue Department. I joined the Police Department to make the world a safer place. Although that sounds a little idealistic, that’s why police do the job. And you’ve passed your driver’s licence, you know the speed limits, what part of 50kph or 100kph didn’t you understand?
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