COVID lockdowns have brought scenes of empty motorways and desolate streets but road deaths actually rose this year.
Key points:
- Road safety experts are calling for an upcoming strategy to be overhauled
- The sector warns the road toll will not improve unless states are forced to improve their data
- They say COVID reporting has proved road accident data could be published daily
There were 1,126 people who died on Australia’s roads in the past 12 months, a 1.4 per cent increase on the year before.
The country’s top motoring and health bodies say a new federal plan to lower the road toll needs a total rework if there is any chance of the government meeting its goal to reduce road deaths to zero by 2050.
National motoring bodies, road trauma organisations and expert health practitioners have written to Infrastructure and Transport Minister Barnaby Joyce asking the government to go back to the drawing board with its 10-year road safety strategy, which is due to be released before the end of the year.
One of the biggest issues, according to the country’s peak motoring body the Australian Automobile Association (AAA), is a “shambolic” approach to collecting information on road deaths, which remains patchy and often missing details.
AAA managing director Michael Bradley said COVID had proven states had the ability to collect detailed information on road safety — but that isn’t being done.
“It’s almost non-existent: you can go to any news website today and you will see how many people in your state have COVID, you can learn about their gender, you know about whether or not they’re in hospital, whether or not they’re on ventilators, you know the proportion of people by local government area who are vaccinated,” he said.
“This is done daily — and yet we can’t tell you how many people are seriously injured in car crashes. There is no national dataset.”
Dr John Crozier, a trauma surgeon who was hand-picked by former minister Darren Chester to lead the government’s review into the past decade’s road safety strategy, has backed the call for the upcoming plan to be overhauled.
Dr Crozier said some safety data, including data on serious injuries, lags by as much as four years.
“Four years in the past data does not helpfully inform modern contemporary road safety practice,” he said.
“We’ve got to do a lot better than that in this upcoming decade.”
The government’s road safety strategy lists improving data as a priority, as it did in 2011, but does not detail how that will be done.
Mr Bradley said the upcoming plan is set to repeat the same mistakes of the last decade unless new rules are introduced to force states to improve their data collection.
“We’re concerned that you’ve got another strategy that says governments are going to do the same thing they signed up to last time,” he said.
“What we’re looking for is some mechanism that compels states and territories to come to the table and change what they do.”
Some road toll targets are getting worse
The AAA said based on recent trends, only NSW and the Northern Territory were on track to meet the government’s target of halving the road toll by the end of the decade.
In fact, while the total road toll has fallen since 2010, motorcyclist deaths have seen almost no improvement in the past decade and cyclist deaths have risen over that time.
Meanwhile, state data that does exist on injuries suggest the number of people hospitalised from road accidents has been rising by about 3 per cent each year since 2013, according to the Department of Infrastructure.
Dr Crozier, who is also the chair of the Royal Australian College of Surgeons’ road trauma committee, said about 100 people were hospitalised each day by road crashes, costing the country $30 billion each year.
“We’ve had a silent epidemic on our roads, that’s seen more people killed [than COVID], seen many, many more seriously injured and hospitalised by road crash, but we’re not anywhere near as aware of that silent epidemic which is the day-to-day reality on our roads,” he said.
“We have many of the solutions, we have many of the ‘vaccines’ on our roads that would deliver fewer crashes … but we’re prevented from the effective implementation of a number of these proven ‘vaccines’ for road safety.”
Dr Crozier has also supported a call from the sector for federal infrastructure funding to the states to be tied to improving the road toll.
Mr Bradley said ministers need to explain how their decisions are being made in the absence of accurate data.
“If you don’t have a data-driven response to a public health problem like COVID or road trauma, or anything else, if you haven’t got the evidence base there to inform your decision, what is driving the actions you’re taking?”
