Leeton's Road Safety expertise goes coast to coast
Leeton Shire Council Road Safety and Traffic Officer Sandra Robinson will be presenting local initiatives to reduce alcohol-related road crashes to both the Institute of Public Works Engineering and the Australasian College of Road Safety.
“This recognition for Sandra’s work is deserved,” said David Laugher, General Manager of Leeton Shire Council. “She has developed many campaigns that have been successful in targeting messages and making real changes to dangerous behaviour in our community.”
According to confirmed crash figures, alcohol has been attributed to 11.9% of all fatalities and injuries in the Shire for the five-year period to December 2008. This is compared to 7.0% for the Riverina Area and 5.5% in New South Wales. It is this high number of incidents that led Mrs Robinson to concentrate her efforts on preventing further trauma in our local community.
The drink drive program ‘Catch You Later Leeton’ has successfully run over the last three years with increasing patronage and awareness of drink drive issues within the community. Over the same period fatal and injury drink drive crashes have dropped from 9 in 2006 to 2 in 2008.
“’Catch You Later’ has been one of the programs which had a direct impact on driver behaviour,” said Sandra Robinson. “As with all our programs we work closely with police, licensed premises, the Roads and Traffic Authority and the health services to tackle this issue.”
This program will form part of the presentation to the Australasian College of Road Safety annual conference in Perth on Thursday 8th November in which Mrs Robinson will outline the multi-faceted approaches she has developed to tackle drink driving.
In her presentation to the Institute of Public Works Engineering at Fairfield on Friday 30 October, Mrs Robinson will outline the ‘R U Over It?’ campaign which she designed to raise awareness of how alcohol’s effects can still be an issue for drivers the following morning. The program is innovative in its approach to tackling this issue and will run as a pilot program in Leeton and Temora. The program is being groomed for state-wide application by the Greater Southern Allied Health Services.
“It is a great honour to have our programs recognised by those within the road safety and engineering fraternities and it gives me a chance to show the rest of the country the great work Council does in our community,” said Sandra Robinson.
Contact details
Sandra Robinson
Tel: 02 6953 0931
rso@leeton.nsw.gov.au
