Updated on
Summary In an effort to promote road safety, one Australian town named Speed renamed itself to Speedkills.
Speed, an outback town in rural Victoria with a population of just 45, will change its name for the month of March to reduce rural road accidents and increase awareness of the dangers associated with speeding.Phil Reed, head of community relations at the Transport Accident Commission said, “Most people recognize that drunk driving is a socially unacceptable activity but they are less convinced about the merits of speed. Our underpinning business objective here is to make the issue of speeding socially unacceptable just as drunk driving.In an effort to broaden its message, the tiny town took its message to television and social networking sites such as Facebook, saying that the name change would go through if it got 10,000 supporters. That target was achieved with 24 hours and currently it has almost 34,000 supporters.According to the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics, the number of road deaths in the year from February 2010 to January 2011 was 1,329 which is a fall of 11.5% from the previous year.
