LOWERING speed limits in congested urban hotspots where pedestrians, cyclists and drivers can’t be separated needs to be considered, WA’s new acting Road Safety Commissioner Iain Cameron says.

Mr Cameron said targeting risky driver behaviour was not the only solution to reducing WA’s road toll. Re-engineering unsafe roads and reducing limits in some areas, such as shopping precincts, needed to be part of the equation.

Last year, the City of Vincent voted to support lowering speed limits to 40km/h, and to 30km/h in school zones, in a proposed two-year trial in a busy section in the southern part of the inner-city area.

The City of Subiaco is this week expected to adopt a new transport plan, which includes progressively reducing the speed limit on most streets from 50km/h to 40km/h.

“About 30 per cent of our crashes are somebody deliberately risk-taking and doing something they should not be doing,” Mr Cameron said.

“If 70 per cent of our crashes are due to an otherwise normal person making a mistake, we’ve actually got to look at the whole system.

“We can educate and enforce, but we’ve got to have safer vehicles, safer roads and safer speeds.

“Where you have got people and pedestrians and cyclists mixing with traffic and you can’t separate them, you need to look at your speed limit.

“We are moving from just relying on behaviour as our only approach, to moving to a system approach where we know that people make mistakes so we re-engineer the environment.”

Vincent Mayor Emma Cole said community consultation on the project would start later this year and if locals backed it, the trial would likely start in 2018-19.

The council is still seeking funding from Main Roads and the Road Safety Commission, which have both provided in-principle support to the 40km/h trial, she said.

Mr Cameron, a key figure in road safety since 2000, warned inattention was just as lethal on our roads as speed, but somehow the message against distracted driving was not sinking in fast enough.

To the middle of this week, inattention and speed had been factors in the same number of fatalities — 13 each — on WA roads so far this year, according to preliminary data.

Mr Cameron said while mobile phones provided a lot of advantages, they had become “our Achilles heel” when it came to distracted driving.

A priority was to look at what other States were doing, accepting WA was “not tracking as well as other jurisdictions”.

Mr Cameron’s predecessor in the role, Kim Papalia, quit last month.