LOCAL senior police are inviting Alpine Shire residents to a Road Policing/Safety Community Forum in Wangaratta in August to potentially help save lives and make our roads safer.
The free forum at the Wangaratta Racecourse Oaks Room on August 27 welcomes local services and community members to talk with police about road safety issues and what is important in the community.
The forum will incorporate the entire Wangaratta Police Service Area (PSA), which includes Alpine, Wangaratta and Moira local government areas.
Acting Inspector of the Wangaratta PSA, Kym Clark, encouraged community members to raise any local road issues or concerns so police can consider changes that may help save someone’s life.
“It’s about how we can do things differently to prevent road trauma, because we don’t want to be dealing with it when it’s a multiple fatality,” she said.
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“People generally know their roads and they know their issues...they see those risks at their intersections and they see those near misses, it’s about sharing that information with us and addressing it holistically.
“For example in Alpine it’s beautiful in autumn and we have a large number of pedestrians who come to that area to take photos of the autumn trees, but they are on a 100kph road....so far we have not had a terrible incident out there."
Road Policing Command Assistant Commissioner Glenn Weir will be part of the senior police panel leading discussions at the forum and encouraging community input.
Acting Inspector Clark said trauma over the past year on local roads was greatly impacted by the loss of eight lives in four days from July 1 to July 4 across the state, including a fatality at Allans Flat.
“The impacts of road trauma in rural areas like ours can have those ripple effects given our small communities and our members attending those events within our communities," she said.
“Our resources are generally based on the trauma, so our high speed rural roads are our predominant area, but then we have our off-road motorcycles, our alpine conditions in the snow and our rural locations in Moira.
“It’s hard to stop road trauma completely, but if everybody can take responsibility for the little things that contribute to it then I think as a community we will all be a lot safer.”
So far a total of 159 lives have been lost on the state roads this year, the same number of fatalities recorded at this time in 2023.
Acting Inspector Clark said road policing and road safety was everyone’s business,
“We’re looking at generating a holistic approach between all of us, trying to get everybody to have a piece of the pie and have that responsibility about it being everybody’s business,” she said.
“If we’re not responding to jobs, then we’re actively out doing PBTs and we’re setting up road sites so there is a visible presence and we’re actively seeking to get those who are putting others at risk off the road.”
The forum will take around two hours from 10am and you can register your attendance by emailing ED4-DIVISIONAL-OFFIC@police.vic.gov.au by Friday, August 16.
