Over the past 22 months, we have watched the daily count of COVID deaths and infections world-wide, while here in Australia in recent weeks, there has been a sudden surge of infections nationwide to levels of infection we’ve not seen before.. In all that time, pushed to the background of our thinking [though not for those personally affected] is the daily scourge of road deaths and associated trauma. This area is the brief subject of my final ‘Coachbuilder’s Column’ for 2021.
A major factor in trying to combat the national road toll, and to determine precise action needed, appears to be a lack of action in co-ordinating data collected, and this is illustrated below in reports by various road accident authorities around Australia – in particular, the lack of data reported as compared with the last two years of reporting on COVID statistics.
Writing in the Victorian tabloid newspaper [Herald Sun] just prior to Christmas, the Editorial was headed ‘Road trauma warning’ ………….”Victoria has an enviable reputation for road safety reforms over the decades, and generally has among the lowest per capita road deaths in the world. So the news that Victoria was the deadliest state for road trauma in November – with the number of fatal crashes rising by 80% – is a real concern. Federal Transport data show that 27 people died on our roads compared with 15 at the same time last year. By contrast, Queensland and NSW both dropped from 24 deaths in November 2020, to 21 this year. ….The alarming figures come as Victoria’s top traffic cop warns of a ‘perfect storm’ of increased crash risk amid young drivers getting behind the wheel after all the lockdowns In today’s Herald Sun, Road Policing Command assistant commissioner Glenn Weir says the problem is compounded due to the inexperience of newly licensed drivers, and a surge of young people rushing to get their licenses. The state government move to deploy a series of ‘pause stops’ on key regional arterial roads over Christmas to counter the expected spike in road trauma is welcome. Drivers must take extra special care during the holiday season”.
Two days after Christmas, we learnt that six lives had been lost on Victorian roads since Christmas Eve, and those six lives convert into tragic trauma for so many associated family and friends, and all the other financial costs associated with such losses.
As Glenn Weir stated after that news – “For most of us, this is an exciting time of the year with holidays and festive cheer in full swing…While we’re asking everyone to slow down, not drink or take drugs and drive, and avoid distractions like mobile phones, rest assured police will also be doing our bit and ramping up enforcement on Victorian roads”. The general warning was to be well rested before driving – with many holiday makers taking summer trips for the first time in two years. Traffic data reveals that 16-20 per cent of fatalities on the state’s roads were attributed to drowsy driving – so current advice is “If you find yourself day-dreaming, missing exits or drifting from your lane, take a break and consider a 15-minute powernap. There are plenty of places to stop all throughout the state, take your time so you can get to your destination safely”.
Always good advice, and yet so often, it is ignored in so many little ways, with one simple second of inattention meaning a lifetime of misery for many, the end of a life for others.
In 1969, the year my father died after an avoidable car accident, there were 3,502 Victorians killed on our roads, which represented .286% of a population of 100,000. In 2018, that figure had dropped to 1,135 [or .046% of a population of 100,000]. It was from those 1969 figures that essentially saw the beginning of major road safety campaigns here in Victoria, aimed particularly at drink driving, and the wearing of seat belts [perhaps the latter may have made a difference in my father’s case?].
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Sadly, those statistics seem to be on the increase again On the national front, despite COVID lockdowns, road fatalities rose this year. As reported by political reporter, Jake Evans on the 20 December, experts fear a new road toll plan isn’t going to work. He noted that COVID lockdowns have brought scenes of empty motorways and desolate streets but road deaths actually rose this year. 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. “There’s no consequence associated with people signing up to say they’re going to do these things, but they never follow through. “What we’re looking for is some mechanism that compels states and territories to come to the table and change what they do.”
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.”
A year-end plea to family, friends and general readers: please stay safe on our roads in 2022, and avoid the unnecessary personal trauma and tragedy which arises from accidents that in the main just should not happen. Don’t become a statistic, as my father did in 1969.
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