Safety
Despite the inherent danger in small and large vehicles traveling at high speeds, the freeway is generally considered one of the safest in Melbourne, with minimal height changes and flowing route, ample shoulder space and well maintained safety barriers. Long sections of the freeway suffer from low lighting levels due to its route and proximity to residential areas.
In the seven years preceding and including 2009, six people died in a section of the freeway known as the Bulleen Bend. This is the tightest bend in the freeway's length, between the Bulleen and Doncaster Road interchanges. Despite the relatively tight bend and 100 km/h limit, there are few safety barriers on the extremities of the road surface, leaving nothing between the cars and the trees on the road shoulder. In 2009 it was announced that $5 million would be spent on installing new barriers in this section.
Read more about this topic: Eastern Freeway (Melbourne)
Famous quotes containing the word safety:
“The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“[As teenager], the trauma of near-misses and almost- consequences usually brings us to our senses. We finally come down someplace between our parents’ safety advice, which underestimates our ability, and our own unreasonable disregard for safety, which is our childlike wish for invulnerability. Our definition of acceptable risk becomes a product of our own experience.”
—Roger Gould (20th century)
“A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion. He becomes a perjurer, all his thoughts and emotions being directed with reference, not to an accurate and just appraisal of the real world but rather to the safety and exaltation of his loved one, and the madness with which he pursues her, transmogrifying his attention, blinds him like a victim.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)