As treasurer in 2020, Perrottet wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece for the Herald in which he identified 10 Sydney structures he would like to see demolished, including the Blues Point Tower, the Cahill Expressway, the Aquarium and “anything brutalist” .
“I am not an architect. But I am a resident of our stunning city and, like millions of other architecturally unenlightened residents, I care about what it looks like,” Perrottet wrote at the time.
“I like to stir the pot when it comes to Sydney architecture. We don’t give it the passionate debate it deserves.”
Road safety experts also questioned why the NSW government needed to use large gantries to display speed limit variations given the increased use of vehicle GPS systems and apps such as Waze and Google Maps that provided verbal and visual warnings and live traffic alerts.
Just this week, the state government announced updates to its own Smart Speed Advisor app. John Wall, from the Center for Road Safety, told Channel Nine that the app, called Speed Adviser, had been updated to alert drivers to mobile speed cameras and when they were traveling over the speed limit.
A 2014 review of this application and other similar systems by Wall, one of Australia’s leading specialists in the application of intelligent transport systems for road safety, found that the technology intelligent speed adaptation such as Speed Adviser had the potential to reduce fatal accidents and serious injuries by around 19. percent.
Australasian College of Road Safety president Professor Ann Williamson said the government’s first response to speed management should not be to erect large gates.
“Our motorways are oversized, they give the impression that you can drive at 200km/h,” he said.
There were already large signs on the road showing the speed limit, he said, but these were difficult to see when covered by traffic (usually when vehicles were traveling less than the posted limit).
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And while cell phone and GPS smart speed systems were effective, Williamson said not everyone had a phone or a modern vehicle.
“If the purpose of the gantry was to let drivers know when they could drive faster on Anzac Bridge, was it worth installing a large gantry that would be a shame?” she said “You need something that clearly shows what the speed limit is, which is maybe a little less annoying.”
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