Worst road death performance since 1966 demands national action
New data shows Australia’s road safety crisis is worsening . The national road toll has increased in each of the past four years: a situation not seen since 1966, or before the introduction of compulsory seatbelts.
Australia’s peak motoring body today released its quarterly Benchmarking the Progress of the National Road Safety Strategy (2021-30), which shows 1,300 people died on Australian roads in 2024 (up from 1,258 in 2023) in Australia’s worst annual result since 2012.
The report also shows the Strategy’s target of halving road deaths through the decade to 2030 is wildly off-track, with road deaths instead increasing by 18.5 per cent since the Strategy commenced.
No Australian jurisdiction is on track to meet its agreed targets, and for many of the Strategy’s KPIs, governments do not even collect the data necessary to measure their progress.
Australia’s peak motoring body today implores politicians to act now to reduce road deaths, urging them to use a globally recognised road-quality assessment system as a tool to guide smarter road investment decisions.
AAA Managing Director Michael Bradley said: “It is clear current road safety approaches are inadequate and that more action is required to save lives.
“We must use data and evidence about crashes, the state of our roads and the effectiveness of police traffic enforcement to establish what is going wrong on our roads and create more effective interventions.’’
The AAA report shows the biggest year-on-year road death increases were in Queensland (9%), Western Australia (17%), the Northern Territory (87%) and the ACT (175%).
In response to Australia’s worsening road trauma crisis, the AAA is calling on the Australian Government to require state and territory governments seeking federal road funding to produce relevant road safety assessments as part of any application.
The AAA believes this transparency will save lives, while also showing Australians whether politicians are spending their taxes to save lives rather than winning votes in marginal electorates.
More than 450,000 kilometres of Australian roads have been assessed using the Australian Road Assessment Program (AusRAP) five-star safety rating system, which uses engineering and other analysis to identify which roads most need safety upgrades.
These assessments are not in the public domain, however state and territory governments in 2024 agreed to end years of secrecy by publishing a range of data, including AusRAP data, on the Federal Government’s National Road Safety Data Hub.
Mr Bradley said: “This critical data must be embedded into the road funding allocation process so investment can be prioritised to our most dangerous roads.
“Australia’s rising road toll underscores the importance of using road condition data to direct road funding, and to prevent the politicisation of scarce public funds.’’
AusRAP rates roads on a five-star scale with one star being the least safe and five the safest. It estimates that each extra star halves a motorist’s risk of death or serious injury.
The Program uses assessment protocols used in around 130 countries to target investment and reduce death and injury. AusRAP road safety assessments consider risk factors such as average daily traffic; speed limit; number of lanes in each direction; lane width; shoulder width; presence or absence of roadside barriers and rumble strips; gradient and curvature; quality of line-markings; skid resistance; whether road is single or dual carriageway; and provisions for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists.
AAA MEDIA CONTACT:
Matthew Franklin, Director – External Affairs
Mobile: 0411 659 868 Email: matthew.franklin@aaa.asn.au