Connecting Kensington Road with Greenhill Road, Hallett Road is a vital road in our community. The road sees approximately 11, 000 vehicles use the road daily and currently has a maximum speed limit of 60 km/h. Some of the major highlights along this road include Newland Park, Ferguson Conservation Park, and Saint Peter’s Girls’ school. There is a lot going on as well from a traffic perspective, round about at one end, a weird dog leg and stop sign at the other, traffic island, large and small street parking, many feed in roads and a pedestrian activated crossing.
So what exactly is the problem with Hallett Road? Well, in the past five years, excluding intersections, 26 car collisions have occurred along this road. There’s clearly an issue. So what can be done?
The council asked the community whether they supported reducing the speed limit to 50km/h, whilst the majority supported a reduction in speed many more issues came up:
Areas, especially around Saint Peter’s Girls’ School and Newland Park, have lots of pedestrian traffic and interactions between pedestrians and parked cars are a point of concern for drivers.
Hallett Road utilises traffic islands; however, combined with cars parked on either side, this can lead to the road changing widths sporadically.
A lack of a school zone near Saint Peter’s Girls’ leads to a higher risk of pedestrian injuries, especially to the young children in the ELC and junior school.
The multiple bus stops along Hallett Road can lead to many busses stopping and starting along the road. Not only does this create an issue concerning the width of the road, but it also creates a visibility issue, with particular note being made of the intersection at Marble Road.
The intersection at Kensington Road and Hallett Road is a hazardous area, with slip lanes, a roundabout, and a limited view to the right of Kensington Road from Hallett Road.
To solve all of these issues, the Council voted to apply to the Commissioner of Highways to reduce the speed limit from 60 km/h to 50 km/h. However, while I am not necessarily opposed to lowering the speed limit, I think these other contributing factors played a greater role in the collisions than speed.
we have very little data on what caused the crashes along Hallett Road. All we know is that over half the crashes were rear-end crashes, and the second most common type after that involved parked cars. We don’t a lot of data about the nature and circumstances of the collisions, were they caused by excessive speed or was it driver inattention traveling at slow speed? While this data is limited, what it suggests is that the cause of the crashes was less about driver speed and more about inattention on the road. With a road that hosts so many potential distractions, lowering the speed might not be the solution to the problems on Hallett Road.
To accurately determine the best way forward with Hallett Road, it is crucial to assess all possible problems and all possible traffic control measures. I use this road often and to me the complexity and changing road conditions that seem to be the real problem, perhaps a school zone or formalised kiss and drop zone, removing some of the traffic islands, standardising on street parking and seeing if we can shift the buses from using Hallett road as a respite spot may improve the issues.
Again, I am not averse to the idea of lowering the speed limit; but I am not convinced it is the only problem… maybe not even the main problem. As a Council, we need to address the actual cause of these crashes, and we need to do it properly if we’re ever going to have a real tangible effect - and we can only do that with proper research.
From here council will apply to the state government to reduce the speed limit to 50km/h but we will also conduct further studies to investigate other potential causes of the high collision rate. We will also attempt to gain more of the crash data so we can understand whether speed really was an issue. The matter will come back to council before being finalised.
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