Every long weekend in Victoria the same script plays out. Victoria Police announces a named road-safety operation. The Transport Accident Commission rolls out a campaign on television and radio. The Minister fronts the cameras at a freeway rest area. By Tuesday morning the road toll for the holiday period is published and read out on breakfast radio, with whatever year-on-year comparison is available.
Our newsroom has been writing up these operations for years and our team gets the same question from readers every time: do they actually work? Mei Calloway has put together what the evidence says, what the operations actually do on the ground, and where the limits of an enforcement-led approach sit.
What Operation RoadWise and Operation RoadShow are
Operation RoadWise is the Victoria Police name most often used for the high-visibility road-policing surge across the Christmas and New Year period. Operation RoadShow is the equivalent banner that has been used at other times of the year, including over Easter, the Queen’s Birthday long weekend and the Labour Day long weekend. The names rotate, the Highway Patrol commander out front of the cameras rotates, but the playbook is consistent.
The operations involve every Highway Patrol member rostered on, supplemented by general-duties units running random breath testing and random drug testing on selected roads. Mobile camera vehicles run extended hours. The Air Wing supports patrol cars on key freeways. Heavy Vehicle Unit members focus on trucks. Fatigue management interviews happen at known rest points.
The TAC pairs the enforcement push with a behavioural campaign. Some of those campaigns have stuck in the public memory for decades — the original “If you drink, then drive, you’re a bloody idiot” from 1989, the wipe-out series, more recent campaigns built around speed, fatigue and mobile-phone distraction. The TAC’s communications budget is among the largest of any agency of its size in Australia.
The history
The named-operation approach to holiday-period enforcement in Victoria dates back to the 1970s, when the road toll was running at well over a thousand deaths a year. The 1989–90 turning point — compulsory random breath testing and the launch of the TAC’s behavioural campaigning, paired with a sustained police enforcement push — is generally credited with breaking the back of the toll. The annual death rate fell from about 776 in 1989 to under 400 by the mid-1990s.
From there the trend has been a long, uneven decline. Operations have evolved with the road environment: more attention to speed in the 2000s, a sharper focus on drug driving once roadside drug testing was introduced in 2004, mobile phone distraction in the 2010s, and over the past decade a return to fatigue and to vulnerable road users — motorcyclists, cyclists, pedestrians.
What the holiday-period numbers actually show
Each holiday operation produces a bulletin that compares the period’s fatalities to the same period last year. Those comparisons are widely reported and badly understood.
The technical problem is sample size. A long weekend involves perhaps three to four days of travel; the number of fatalities in that window is in the order of zero to a dozen. A move from four to nine year-on-year is statistically unremarkable — it is exactly the kind of swing you would expect from random variation in a small count — but it makes a striking headline. The same is true in reverse: a quiet weekend does not, on its own, prove the operation worked.
The signal in the noise is the trend over years and the trend in serious-injury crashes, which the TAC tracks alongside fatalities and which produce more stable numbers. Across a decade those numbers have trended down, with two interruptions — the COVID period, when traffic volumes collapsed and then rebounded, and the post-COVID years, when fatalities ticked back up partly because regional travel and motorcycle riding both rose.
What works, what works less, and what might not work at all
Three decades of evaluation of road-safety enforcement in Australia and overseas points to a fairly consistent set of conclusions.
Random breath testing works. The deterrence effect of RBT comes from the perceived likelihood of being tested rather than the actual rate of testing — which is why visible RBT, on visible roads, at advertised times, suppresses drink driving even at quite modest testing volumes. Victoria’s introduction of compulsory RBT in 1976, expanded through the 1980s, is one of the clearest natural experiments in Australian public health.
Speed cameras, including the mobile-camera program, also work, though more contentiously. The peer-reviewed evaluations, including by the Monash University Accident Research Centre, find that fixed and point-to-point cameras reduce crashes at the camera site and on the corridor. Mobile cameras have a similar effect when their locations are unpredictable — predictability is what kills the deterrence.
Drug driving enforcement is newer and the evidence is thinner. Roadside oral fluid testing has caught significant numbers of drivers with cannabis and methamphetamine in their systems, but the relationship between detected concentrations and actual driving impairment is not as well established as the relationship for alcohol. The Coroners Prevention Unit has recommended further work on this point.
Holiday-period enforcement surges, considered on their own, have a smaller measurable effect than many readers would assume. The reason is that the bulk of the road toll is incurred outside long weekends, on ordinary regional roads, on ordinary days. A surge concentrated on holiday weekends moves a small slice of the total. What it does, though, is cement the social norm — the idea that the police might be anywhere, that drink driving is unacceptable, that mobile phones come down — and that norm operates the rest of the year too.
The behavioural-economics argument
The TAC’s communications strategy has, since the late 1980s, been guided by behavioural research drawn partly from the academic literature and partly from market research. The operating insight is that drivers do not weigh future consequences rationally. They discount low-probability harms heavily — even harms as severe as their own death — unless the harm is made vivid and the probability salient.
Hence the choice in early TAC campaigning to show consequences directly, often graphically, rather than to lecture about probabilities. Hence too the close pairing of campaign with enforcement: the campaign provides the imagined consequence, the enforcement provides the felt risk of being caught. Either alone is weaker than the two together.
More recent behavioural research has emphasised social norm framing — what your neighbours and your peer group are doing — over fear appeals. The TAC’s campaigns have shifted accordingly, with more emphasis on small everyday choices and less on graphic crash imagery, though the older approach has not entirely gone.
The criticisms
Holiday-period operations attract criticism from two directions. From one side, road-safety campaigners argue the surges are too narrow — that the toll is a year-round problem and that pulsed enforcement misallocates resources. From the other, motorist-advocacy groups argue that mobile cameras and speed-focused enforcement target relatively safe drivers for revenue rather than addressing the high-harm cohort of drink drivers, drug drivers and unlicensed drivers who do not respond to camera deterrence at all.
Both criticisms have force. Where the policy answer has tended to land — at least in Victoria’s case — is to do more of both: maintain the pulsed surges for their public-norm value, expand year-round automated enforcement for its corridor-level effect, and direct Highway Patrol to the high-harm cohort through intelligence-led tasking rather than through random stops alone.
What this means for ordinary drivers
The headline outcome of fifty years of road-safety operations is that an average Victorian driver in 2026 faces a far lower risk of being killed on the road than their parents did, even though they drive more. The combined contribution of vehicle design, road design, behavioural change and enforcement is the reason. None of those four works without the others.
If you are involved in a crash, call 000. The TAC operates Victoria’s no-fault scheme regardless of who was at fault and you do not need a lawyer to begin a claim. If you are concerned about a driver’s behaviour — repeated hooning, erratic driving — the police line is 1800 333 000.
