I've just come back from Adelaide a few hours ago - its my 6th trip going between Melbourne and Adelaide now in the past two years.
I went the Western Highway route for the first time on the way over on Thursday and you're on this dual lane freeway that turns into a highway with a paltry 110-100-80km/h speed limit and going through a few towns, add in some traffic, road works slowing everything down putting in those useless wire rope barriers and the typical wipe off 5 slowpokes or grey nomads getting in the way, the car was showing an average speed of 75km/h across 600km between my driveway and Tailem Bend in SA.
On the way back I did my usual run where I hit all the back roads between the farms, some sort of half tarmac half gravel type roads where theres hardly anyone around and I go significantly faster than the 100 km/h speed limit, its just farms and wind turbines around - theres a good 100km of these roads where you come across very few people, 600km from Tailem Bend to my driveway, car was showing average speed of 98km/h.
The latter, I'm too busy concentrating rather than thinking about looking at my phone.
Ever thought the reason people use their phones is that the limits are so god damn low around the capital cities that inattention becomes the problem? Tullamarine Freeway is 6 lanes wide in either direction at some points and its 80km/h and even then you're lucky to be doing 40km/h in peak hour, half the time its at a crawl, might bump off the back of someone at 10km/h if you're too busy looking at your phone.
Mind you me waking up at 5AM, only making one fuel stop, 600km into the trip without drinking or eating, then going to bed 3:30AM and then waking up at 6AM and doing the same thing return seems to be less of a concern to the authorities than if I was using my phone in my daily commute behind the wheel while I'm crawling along at 20km/h for the road I'm paying over $2000/year to use.
In SA they seem to be more concerned about people not wearing seatbelts than anything else
They've got all these seatbelt campaigns along the Dukes Highway - who doesn't wear seatbelts?
Sounds like revenue raising to me - NSW will introduce it and VIC will have it looking at everyones driveway.
The Government needs to spend less time babying people, the road toll is only something like 300 people per year, more males die from suicide every year but you don't make money preventing suicide but you do from someone using their phone while driving or doing 3km/h over the speed limit.
300 deaths per year out of 25 million people is an acceptable casualty rate to me, especially considering the length of the average commute has increased significantly.
I'd say just quietly thats because of advancements in technology rather than the effect of speed cameras and now phone cameras.