579...but the school zone restrictions are over-applied. In my area (Dural, Hills District of Sydney) the local school has high wire fences on either side of the road, with an elevated walk-over to the bus area well away from the road. The kids don't go anywhere near the road, yet there is a 40kph restriction, which is often monitored by the goons (sorry police) hiding in nearby bushes. Further along Old Northern Rd there is a private school, with a drive-in pick-up and drop off area for buses and parents. No risk of any kid crossing the road. Yes, speed restrictions and heavy fines apply. Revenue raising, not safety? It certainly is.

Similar story to mine Wheels- I once passed a fenced-up roadside school zone exactly like the one you describe, only with a speed camera that, rather than being placed on the side street, is on the impassable main road, mysteriously facing a steep downhill slope (where I had to squeeze the brakes just above 'parking' to stay under.
So, instead of focus on places where children might actually cross the road, it was the one place where that was impossible to cross, but easy to go over 40k on a downhill decent.

Dougthebear- wrong.
QLD government MUST put the money to roads- NSW do not- they are free to spend as they wish.
And if you'd like to believe that NSW Labor are an honest bunch who sincerely care about our wellbeing, then good for you.
Sadly, the Lane Cove Road debacle and numerous dodgy privatizations and public facility sell-offs to real-estate have shaken out any delusions or rose-colored tint I would have had for them as wise nannies earnesty trying to push us in the right direction, than a bunch of crooks.

But for alternatives to make a difference:
-Vastly more coverage on the issues of tailgating, swerving, sudden deceleration, multiple lane-changing, non-indicating, etc
-Restricting a license from people who fail to show capabilities to do otherwise, along with failure to judge distances to position their vehicle, react, maintain awareness, etc:
-Terminate school zones on major roads, erect fences
-More expressways/tunnels linking more of the city, built to accommodate higher speeds
-More public transport infrastructure
-Restore Lane Cove Road to pre-tunnel state, convert other major roads to accomodate higher speeds.
-Drink-driving = automatic loss of license and possibly imprisonment.
-NO privatizatios
-confirmed +10% exceeding of speed minimum to be liable for speeding offense

That way, less dangerous people have access to cars- instead of being waved through after lenient driving tests, and roads are adjusted to allow people to travel faster.

In the words of my mother driving is like dancing. If you dance out of tune you will step on other peoples toes.

Speed limits provide the tempo for everyone "Dancing" on the roads. Those who dance too fast and also those who dance too slow are likely to have or cause accidents.

If you want to see what I'm talking about go to India where the speed limits on the freeway are 50km per hour but drivers drive at anything from 10km/hr to 100km/hr. Slow drivers drive down the centre of the white lines as though they are guidance markers and faster drivers weave in and out of the slow traffic until someone miss-calculates and rams a car from behind.

Ask yourself how much time do you save if you speed?

A trip of 100km will take 60 minutes at 100km/hr and 55 minutes at 110km/hr.

A trip of 20km will take 20 minutes at 60km/hr and 17 minutes at 70 km/hr.

Is 5 minutes of your life really that precious?

In an urban environment the real requirement is to travel at the same speed the lights are sequenced. If lights are green for X seconds then the same number of cars will get through traveling with a 2 second headway interval irrespective of whether they are traveling at 60 or 70km/hr.

Travel too fast or slow and the block of traffic is stopped and loses several seconds getting moving again. If only our traffic engineers can get this simple formula right...

time of travel between lights = distance between lights / speed of road.

And that goes onto the next point of why our roads need to be modified:

Zero traffic lights mean (safely) speeding only decreases your journey time by a couple of minutes (although removing school zones on major roads would drastically decrease travel time by half for quite a few people).

Factor in traffic lights (not including the jams they cause), and your speed could make the difference between getting through a series of lights (and thus avoid being compressed with other vehicles and increasing your own danger if you need to change lanes), and reducing 5 minutes each light, potentially: If you were to reduce a 30 minute trip to a 25 minute trip- but narrowly avoided 8 red lights (and over a distance in the Sydney region, it could be higher)- it may very well be a 50 minute trip.
Double that for the return journey, and you see the problem.

Sydney is simply too crowded, and too much planned to act as a very very large surburbia than a real city with fast access between sub-towns, making a 10 km journey longer than 15 minutes (more likely double) quite unreasonable for such a small distance.

Of course, with traffic reduction of making it harder to access a driving license (enough to permit driving in certain roads), the need for traffic lights is reduced (and the need for lower speeds in many cases).

And considering that people who can't obtain a strict license clearly are not safe on our roads regardless of speed (as the statistics prove, most accidents are at lower speeds)- then this should be the obvious solution.

I realised something this afternoon about how silly this whole thread is.

We live in a parliamentary democracy. That is, we elect our representatives who in turn make laws and spend our money on our behalf.

We have the right, indeed the obligation, to tell our representatives what we want of them. If they do not respond they can be, and are, voted out of office and other elected in their place.

To use Lincolns famous quote from the Gettysberg Address, which, while in another place and another context still applies to our western partliamentary deomocracy, our government is a "government of the people, by the people, for the people".

So, the people already decide, through our elected representatives.

It seems that it is just those people who think that they are above the rest of us who feel that they should be the ones to decide differently, which seems to be the tone of both the original piece, and many of the posters here.