Mobile Rbt Plan For Back Streets

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday September 4, 1987

By MALCOLM BROWN

Drinking drivers are likely to find the escape route home along back streets far more perilous from mid-December when the State Government is expected to introduce mobile Random Breath Test units to patrol districts around stationary units.

Police cars with RBT facilities would be moving in the streets around stationary RBT units without specially signalling their presence.

Under the plan, Random Breath Test units will now be stationary, with blue lights flashing, on main routes with other stationary units in some side streets to catch drivers taking evasive action.

No longer will the sodden imbiber sit in the bar in the late hours, confidently plotting how he will avoid the areas of highway he knows there might be an RBT unit, and how he will zip through silent back lanes to the security of his own garage.

Nor, according to Chief Inspector Peter Andrews, Acting Superintendent, Operations, for the Police Traffic Branch, will there be any special security in driving in model fashion, heart-in-mouth, past the blue flashing lights banking on the fact that the police manning them do not select you.

The mobile units will be somewhere "out there" beyond the stationary unit, and will be placed to spot a driver lapsing into more lackadaisical ways.

Bringing in mobile RBT units, which have been tested for the last five weeks at Lismore and Port Macquarie, will be the biggest change in the RBT system since its introduction five years ago.

The Police Minister, Mr Paciullo, who ordered the system to be tested from August 1, said yesterday that though the trial was meant to go for six months, results so far indicated it was very effective.

"If I am convinced along the way that the results are conclusive then I will move to shorten the trial," he said.

"It has come to my notice that there is a hardcore element unprepared to change their habits in their belief that they can continue to drink and then drive home along back streets.

"In many country localities the existence of a stationary unit has been relayed through clubs and pubs and through CB radios which has lowered the likelihood of the hard drinkers being caught.

"So for those reasons I have, at the police recommendation, agreed to this trial and that will mean that in future no-one will be able to feel they will not be breath-tested."

Stationary Random Breath Tests in the meantime are continuing at a high level, following what police describe as a "bumper year" last year.

In the seven months to the end of July this year there were 737,591 tests, 154,000 over the target which aims at one million tests every 12 months.

In the seven months, there were 3,330 charges laid.

The death rate is still well down. Up to 8 am yesterday there had been 611 deaths in NSW for the year, 78 fewer than last year.