Perth Voice Interactive

THE 40kmh speed trial along Inglewood’s stretch of Beaufort Street has been deemed a success by Stirling council’s traffic watchers, with crash rates halving compared to the 60kmh era.

For years many locals and business owners had been calling for a slow-down along that strip of Beaufort between Central Avenue and Crawford Ave (“Beaufort Street petition,” Voice, May 6, 2017).

Stirling council started the two-year trial in mid-2021, installing variable speed signs and fiddling with the applicable times of day a few times before settling on 40kmh between 7.30am and 10pm.

The data from the first full year in 2022 is now back and it looks to have been a success: The “85th percentile speed” – the traffic industry’s standard measure of the speed that 85 per cent of vehicles are travelling below – has dropped from 50.9km/h to 45.7km/h. 

A 5km drop is a pretty big win, even if many drivers are still going above the limit. Attempts to drop Vincent’s residential speed limit to 40kmh only resulted in an average 1kmh drop in speed (“Trial cuts speeds by 1km,” Voice, February 25, 2023).

And while that stretch had averaged 44 crashes a year when it was 60kmh, it clocked in 23 in the first full year of the trial. Crashes causing serious injuries dropped from an average of eight a year to just one. 

A Stirling staff report to councillors concedes it’s tricky to definitively place all these effects at the feet of the trial. Beaufort Street also saw a 15 per cent drop of traffic in the two years since the trial started. That may have been people avoiding the slower route, or it may have been people returning to using public transport and about a 25 per cent increase in public transport patronage. 

Many residents living on Beaufort’s side roads had opposed the trial, fearing a slowdown on the main street would see more cars navigating through their residential streets as a shortcut (“Inglewood in the slow lane,” Voice, February 8, 2020).

Their fears partly were borne out, with some streets getting 15 to 20 per cent more traffic. But even the busiest side street only hit 310 vehicles per day, still far below the recommended maximums for quiet residential roads. 

Stirling councillors are due to vote on whether to make the trial permanent at their February 13 meeting.

by DAVID BELL