WHEN THE ROAD TOLL goes down, authorities are quick to take the credit. But when it goes up, as it has been doing for some years, everybody ducks for cover, blaming everything they can think of, but usually the irresponsibility of drivers.
Millions of dollars are spent across the country every year in so-called road safety advertising campaigns. Despite this, the road toll has increased in every state and territory with the exception of NSW and the NT.
Normally, seniordriveraus calls out authorities for basing their claims on numbers that are too small to be statistically reliable, but when you take the road toll across the country, over a number of years, the statistics start to take on some validity.
By March 2023, there have already been 1204 fatalities on our roads, 67 more than at the same time last year (Australian Automobile Association figures). Much has been made of the stated goal to halve our national road toll by 2030. If we were on track for this, there would have been 193 fewer deaths since 2021when the National Road Safety Strategy was implemented.
Instead, road deaths are up 10 percent since then.
Michael Bradley of the Australian Automobile Association claims the government has failed to introduce systems to properly assess the problem.
“Road deaths have increased over the past five years, and a lack of road trauma data reporting makes it difficult to understand the reasons for this trend and to identify the measures needed to prevent them,” Mr Bradley said.
“Australia’s trajectory to meet the National Road Safety Strategy targets of halving road deaths through the decade to 2030 and reducing serious injuries by 30 percent is badly off course.”
As we have stated many times, gaining access to meaningful data is difficult, if not impossible. Several targets which states and territories have promised to improve simply cannot be tracked due to a lack of data, including deaths in CBD areas, reducing serious injury on roads and national highways and high-speed road deaths.
The AAA has urged the federal government to make transport funding to the states conditional on them improving and sharing road crash data.
The National Farmers Federation also warned last week that funding for rural roads in the federal budget was “dismal”, and that the government had ignored its calls for an emergency funding package to repair rural roads damaged by flooding.
In the meantime, the federal government is reviewing its public infrastructure investment pipeline. And people continue to die on our roads.