Road safety activists have long advocated for average speed cameras to target all vehicles, and NSW Roads Minister John Graham has now made it official. Nick Whigham Nick

Speeding is about to get a lot more difficult. A new trial due to begin in Australia’s largest jurisdiction will significantly expand the use of point-to-point cameras that measure vehicle average speeds in order to catch regular drivers doing the wrong thing. Currently, the technology is almost solely used to monitor truck drivers, but New South Wales has announced that it would no longer be a global outlier in terms of point-to-point speed detection and its heavy-vehicle legislation.

Cars will now be monitored for average speed during a trial on two stretches of roadway where six people have died in recent years. All other mainland Australian states, as well as nations such as the United Kingdom, Norway, Italy, and the Netherlands, have found average speed cameras to be effective, according to Roads Minister John Graham, who announced the change on Sunday. “We aim to be as rigors as possible to be sure they will also reduce road trauma in NSW,” according to him.

Legislation will be necessary to launch the trial, which will run over a 15-kilometer stretch of the Pacific Highway between Kew and Lake Innes on the mid-north coast, as well as a similar length of the Hume Highway north of Gundagai. However, there will be a short grace period, which means that drivers caught speeding will not be penalised immediately. Offending motorists will instead receive written warnings for the first 60 days, after which financial and licence consequences will apply. In February, Yahoo reported that the NSW government was considering the change. “The government will examine the evidence here… Graham stated at the time that the government’s initiatives to address increased road fatalities,

However, adjustment was made available on Sunday.

Sydney’s 37 existing point-to-point camera systems (shown on a state map) extend from the Sydney Harbour Tunnel and the city’s ring of tollways to a 94-kilometer length of the Newell Highway in the state’s west. For the time being, the vast majority will continue to be used just for trucks, but it is anticipated that they will soon be employed to monitor the more than 7 million registered vehicles that travel to the state’s highways each year.

Any future decision to make the trial permanent, or to expand it to NSW’s 35 other average-speed zones, will require parliament’s approval. The policy was one of several recommended outcomes from a road safety summit in Sydney in April, which included 155 experts. Road safety advocates have advocated for the removal of warning signs on the approach to fixed and mobile speed cameras, but no adjustments have been revealed. In 2023, speeding was responsible for 44% of road deaths in NSW, with three-quarters occurring in regional NSW.