Left-hand drive initiative for Oz

Several months' worth of input from think tanks and lobby groups has found its way into a report by the Productivity Commission recommending Australians drive on the right.

The report, titled 'The Right Direction for Australia's roads', has been accepted in Canberra by the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport, the Honourable Michael McCormack MP.

In the report, the Commission has argued the case for Australia's extensive network of roads, plus private thoroughfares and car parks to swap sides – with signage repainted or redeployed for driving on the right, and traffic lights turned 180 degrees and shifted across the road. Give way and stop signs will also need to be relocated.

At the plan's very core is the top-down reprogramming of computerised traffic management systems covering major urban areas.

The Productivity Commission recommends that the change take place gradually, much like the NBN rollout – with colour-coded street signs, traffic lights and line markings to indicate where a road or street has been converted to driving on the right. Day-glo orange is the preferred colour, until specific municipalities have made the full conversion.

Two traffic management systems will have to run in parallel – and interconnectedly – for each municipal area, until such time as the area is full converted to driving on the right. Mapping of geo-spatial data for GPS/satellite navigation will be rolled out in one stage at the completion of the building works and migration of computerised systems to left-hand drive configuration.

In other words, that will be the very last phase of the rollout.

It's a big project – costed at $23 billion – which the Productivity Commission anticipates will take five years to complete, beginning in 2020.

Yet that's just the start.

The Productivity Commission has a secondary agenda in play – converting our largest population centres to eco-friendly environments ready for level five autonomous motoring.

This second tier of the plan involves dramatic changes to civil engineering fixtures such as roundabouts, traffic islands and traffic pacifiers to ease congestion, reduce fossil-fuel pollution and simplify the merger of autonomous with non-autonomous vehicles in traffic.

The Commission offers several supporting arguments for Australia making the change to left-hand drive. Firstly, there's design and engineering harmonisation with other advanced economies that are, in the main, left-hand drive. This would bring down the cost of new cars…

Over time, it could bring down the road toll. Currently visitors from overseas are often confused by driving on the left. Victoria's Great Ocean Road features warning signs reminding drivers to keep left on Australian roads. Just last year the Victorian government introduced new, electronic signs that switch between English and Mandarin on the road, the icon stretch of bitumen being a popular drive for tourists from China.

The Productivity Commission cites other countries, such as Sweden in the early 1960s, that have successfully made the switch from driving on one side to the other. And with the future looking decidedly 'autonomous', it will matter less in years to come which side of the road cars run, if they're being guided by on-board computer systems and interactive infrastructure.

Responding to the point that mixing right and left-hand drive cars on the road could pose safety issues, the Productivity Commission rightly makes the observation that left-hand drive cars are already mixing it up on Australian roads – if they're over 30 years old.

Overtaking on the ‘wrong’ side of the road is increasingly rare in Australia, the Commission continues to explain, with over 90 per cent of the population living and working in urban centres where overtaking is either impractical or illegal other than on a multi-lane arterial carriageway.

And with current new-car sales consistently breaking annual records, approximately a quarter of Australia's vehicle fleet could comprise left-hook vehicles by the time the conversion to a left-hand drive network of roads is complete. Five years after that, autonomous cars will be increasingly common on local roads, nailing a further fastener in the coffin of right-hand drive cars.

Within 20 years natural attrition will account for almost all the remaining right-hook cars, which will number around the same percentage of the national vehicle fleet as 30-year old grey imports from America do currently.

This article was published on the morning of April 1, 2018 and is not to be taken seriously.