One of the riskiest periods for ACT drivers will be in the month ahead, and not necessarily when driving within their home jurisdiction.
As the holiday period approaches, thousands of Canberra drivers will be planning to head to the NSW South Coast, many of them using the most direct Kings Highway connection through Braidwood and Nerriga.
Transport Minister Chris Steel warned that parts of the highway are under repair and motorists should be patient and obey the posted speed limits.
"Drivers should allow extra time to get to their destination and be patient during expected periods of congestion," he said.
"Reducing speed, maintaining the speed limit and leaving a safe distance with the vehicle in front can reduce risks by giving you more time to react to unexpected circumstances."
Living with a landlocked jurisdiction of NSW, Canberra's holiday drivers are largely travelling outside the territory during the peak summer period which means that the risk is transferred to NSW, yet the data from these "external" crashes involving ACT drivers is not properly collated.
Improved data collection from these crashes to feed into a national framework has been flagged as one of the priorities ahead under the new ACT road safety action plan released on Wednesday.
Compiling more comprehensive data from injuries resulting from e-scooter crashes, an expansion of low speed zones across the territory and re-examining policies around licensing of international drivers and the transfer of registration of vehicles from other jurisdictions also have been flagged as priorities ahead under the action plan.
The new plan will also assess the "missing links" of community cycle paths around the territory such as along Melrose Drive and connect up the so-called "city loop" around Marcus Clarke Street and Rudd Street.
After the shared e-scooter geo-fencing recently was expanded to include Woden and Gungahlin, particularly out in the new-build suburbs of Moncrieff and Jacka, the goal is to ensure that the networks there are safe and connected as the people move in.
The proliferation of e-scooters and e-bikes as so-called shared mobility carries a double-edged sword for the ACT government, which had been blind-sided on the largely undocumented rate of injury that these devices, which do not require any form of registration or insurance, can generate.
While the 1800 rental e-scooters in the ACT have speed governors which limit them to 25kmh and are largely used as "last mile" travel alternatives, privately owned e-scooters and e-bikes often travel much greater distances, are used for long distance commuting and can be easily re-programmed to travel at much higher speeds, as evidenced by the rider clocked at over 100kmh on the Majura Parkway 12 months ago.
And as motorists often take their cues on appropriate driving speeds from the streetscape around them, new street and intersection infrastructure will take in research from overseas countries such as The Netherlands, which also has a huge amount of shared roads and uses road design as a speed-governing tool.
