Media Release - Committee for Mornington Peninsula calls for regional road safety programs to be delivered on Mornington Peninsula to save young lives
The Committee for Mornington Peninsula has recently written to the Minster for Road Safety, the Hon Ben Carroll to seek the extension of the UnSafe2Safe program to be delivered on the Mornington Peninsula.
The Unsafe2Safe program provides $5000 to young people who trade in a car older than 16 years, to a car younger than 10 years. However, the program is only available to young people in Regional Victoria.
As the Mornington Peninsula communities know too well after the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, the Mornington Peninsula is classified as metropolitan and not regional. This classification has been the centre of some debate in recent years following calls for the Mornington Peninsula to become Regional. The CfMP conducted a study in partnership with Urban Enterprises to compare key factors of the Mornington Peninsula community, economy and land use to metro and regional Victoria. Overwhelmingly this report found that the MP is far more closely aligned with regional Victoria, than with metro.
The Mornington Peninsula has an unacceptably high level of road trauma. Over the past decade alone over 75 people were killed and over 1500 seriously injured on Mornington Peninsula Roads. The vast majority of the incidents involving facilities occur on the roads which service the rural areas of the Mornington Peninsula. These roads have very similar characteristics to the roads found more broadly in regional Victoria, such as lack of lighting, large trees and a lack of safety barriers.
The CfMP has called on the Minster to extend the program to the Mornington Peninsula as it would assist to reduce the large road toll on the Mornington Peninsula. According to the Committee’s President Shannon Smit
‘many of the young people on the MP live in areas of social disadvantage and are required to travel on rural roads to get to work or education from places such as Hastings and Crib Point’.
Mrs Smit also explained that ‘Our public transport is virtually non existent for young people to get to school, work or higher education’
This combination of social disadvantage, lack of public transport and road risk provide for similar risk factors which have underpinned the Government’s role out of the Unsafe2Safe program in regional Victoria.
According to Mrs Smit ‘though a simple administrative process this program could be rolled out on the MP and create significant safety improvements that will lead to fewer deaths on our roads’
