National Road Safety Strategy on the Road to Failure

New analysis by Australia’s peak motoring body shows almost 90 per cent of the targets in the National Road Safety Strategy will not be met and governments are failing to fulfill the commitments made. The work has been done as part of the AAA’s submission to the Government’s recently announced inquiry into the Strategy. Signed by state and federal governments in 2011, the Strategy specifically aims to reduce death and injuries by 30 per cent through the decade to 2020 and contains 33 individual Safety Performance Indicators. Analysis released today shows only four of those 33 indicators are “On Track” to be met. A further six have been classified as “Not on Track”, while a further 15 have been deemed “unlikely to be met”. The results are set out in the AAA’s National Road Safety Strategy Progress Report, which compares data from regional, remote and metropolitan roads and displays the results in an easily understood traffic-light format. Chief executive of the AAA Michael Bradley said that alarmingly, eight of the 33 Indicators are still not being measured or possessing agreed targets.

“This analysis is a damning indictment of those who have been responsible for the Strategy’s implementation since 2011 and reflects a disjointed and disorganised approach to road safety in this country."

“That fewer than one in ten KPIs are likely to be met – and that a quarter of KPIs still aren’t even being measured - reinforces the widely held view that government does not take this problem seriously.

“We have just experienced the deadliest month on Australian roads since 2011 and it should serve as a wake-up call to government that continued inaction is having devastating consequences”.

NRSS high level outcome progress

Benchmark	Baseline 2008-10	Actual 2016	Progress
Number of deaths resulting from road crashes	1426	1296	-9.1%
Number of road crashes resulting in deaths	1297	1203	-7.3%
Number of deaths per 100,000 population	6.6	5.4	-18.7%
Number of deaths per 100 million vehicle kilometres travelled	0.63	0.52	-18.0%
Number of deaths per 10,000 registered vehicles	0.91	0.7	-22.5%
Number of serious injuries resulting from road crashes	Still not measured	Still not measured	Still not measured

ENDS.