Road toll report: WA the worst
July 16, 2008 by Karl Peskett
For the third year in a row, Western Australia has claimed the title of the worst state in Australia for road deaths per capita.
Yesterday, a report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau showed that in the last financial year there were 10.4 road deaths per 100,000 West Australians. Respectively, next worst region was Tasmania, with 8.3 deaths per 100,000. Queensland had 7.9 deaths per 100,000, South Australia 6.8, Victoria 6.3, New South Wales 5.7 and the ACT had just 4.4 deaths per 100,000 people.
WA’s automobile club, the RAC, said it was sick of the current government’s lack of progress on road safety.
“The one thing that concerns us most is the fatality rate is still up there with the worst,” RAC Executive Manager, Member Advocacy David Moir said. “Only the Northern Territory is up there with us, and that’s no endorsement.”
“What is most disturbing is that WA has been up there for the past couple of years,” Mr Moir said. “The Government needs to get this new road safety strategy implemented as soon as possible. We are concerned there’s no step-up in the Government’s efforts on road safety at the moment, when we have a serious problem with road safety in WA.”
This is despite an increase in speed cameras, and more visible police cars with highly reflective livery.
Regardless of where we live in this country, deaths on the roads are not acceptable.
CarAdvice would like to know what your strategy for tackling the road toll would be. What would you present to your state government, as a solution to bringing down the road toll?
Print it: 
****PRIMO!****
NT, now has a Hwy. speed limit, road toll has INCREASED alarmingly.
SpeedKills? BULLSHIT!
WHY DOESENT THE MEDIA POLICE BRING THIS TO ATTENTION?
Cheers
F-0
What surprises me is the death toll for Tasmania. I have recently lived there for a few years & found their roads to be of an exceptional high quality (in general !) & find it hard to work out why they have had so many fatalities.
Cheers !
It would be hard to try and generalise the problem in WA as simply being an inadequate government response.
Studying the statistics one may find a very high proportion of single vehicle-motorcyclist and single driver deaths or alcohol/drug based accidents etc. The drivers age demographic would also make interesting reading.
Could ACA give us more information from your involvement in driver safety.
Having driven WA & national roads for nearly 40years, and spending a very high proportion of time on the road courtesy of work, I have observed a huge increase in traffic density in the last ten years. Speed reduction schemes such as cameras etc are frustrating but not the only answer. Some of our road systems were not designed to cope with such volumes.
Inevitably it also comes back to personal responsibility and driver expertise and I hate to say it – an element now of Luck!
I’d like to see the stats of deaths per 100,000 km travelled too. A good proportion of our deaths occur in the country (where speed cameras never go) and we are the biggest state, so I am thinking we drive much longer distances and people push the limits of tiredness.
Additionally, I don’t think they can ever get to zero road deaths. A little cleansing of the gene pool will always occur and that might be a good thing to keep people thinking that driving is a dangerous exercise that requires concentration and commitment.
One of the biggest problems here is a majority of vehicles on our roads. There are still a lot of cars out there that have poor crash test ratings, and none of the crucial safety features that most new vehicles now come with standard. Features that prevent accidents from happening in the first place. There’s just too many drivers out there that don’t know how to handle an emergency braking/swerving situation, and their old crap handling (and maybe bald tyre ridden) Corollas or Falcadores end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. This revenue raising speed camera crap is a load of hogwash.
The main problem I see is people do not know what to do when faced with a potentialy bad situation. Most people would panic and simply jump on the break pedal when attempting to avoid an accident.
I also see a large number of people on the road who are to blase when driving and simply drift all over the road thinking that they are the only ones there.
These are the people causing the accident on the roads because all they do is look straight ahead and think that what is happening either side or behind them doesnt matter because they are not travelling in that direction.
If they think speed is the #1 killer they need to pull their heads out of their asses as there have been a number of studies (mostly coming from Germany I believe) showing that people who driver slightly faster than the limit are safer than those who stick strictly to or just below the limit because those driving faster are more concious of what is going on around them and are better prepared when faced with a dangerous situation.
please correct me if I am wrong.
I would be interested to find out what that converts into for ‘deaths per km travelled’?
And what proportion were on the major highways?
The sheer distance you need to drive up the west coast at a stupidly slow speed sends you too sleep!
Too many instances of overcrowded cars ?
Here is then a list of factors that needs to be considered:
1. Lack of driving techniques.
2. Lack of concentration due to fatigue.
3. Lack of concentration due to drug and/or alcohol.
4. Lack of awareness of the road (full attention given to the speedometer instead of the road).
5. People keep looking around bushes for speed camera instead of looking at the traffic.
6. Poor visibility on the road (at night) due to lack of streetlights.
7. Driving with RAGE.
8. People simply are hoons with their old Falcodore thinking they can trash it since it’s old.
Here you go, a short (yet to be completed) list of the main causes of accidents. It’s up to the politicians to do something about it (i’m being very optimistic).
There is plenty of evidence out there that the big causes relate more to inattention, failure to look, drugs and alcohol, fatigue. Outright speed as speed as a sole cause as we all know is very minor (1-5%). Unfortunately those in positions of ‘responsibility’ who make the decisions tend to pander to vocal non-evidence based groups, plus want to make a lot of money for the government (although they will never say this officially).
I suspect that there will always be a certain ‘death rate’ but until factors that contribute to driver error are minimised it is unlikely that a large reduction in deaths will occur.
Apparently if we all wore helmets when we drove it could reduce death and serious head injury by 20% or more…the government would just have to legislate to make it compulsory so that we could all look equally stupid :)
The roads in Tasmania are very bad, I live here, especially minor roads.
When running post license driver training the two biggest I had with attendees on my courses were:
a) driver behaviour and attitude (ambition over abilility with the males and a lack of skills with the females), and
b) a total lack of knowledge of the road rules (most people i asked got their licenses in rural regions over the counter at the local police station).
What would effectively reduce the road toll is driver training as part of the education system (a few years of attitude ‘conditioning’ before even getting behind the wheel) and constant (if not yearly) retesting of the road rules (which are ammended all of the time – unbeknown to most).
For your info the last time I checked the official figures for true causes of fatalities the list is as follows
1) fatigue – featureless terrain and not enough rest stops
2) Inattention – distractions in the car
3) Inexperience
4) Speed – Speed doenst kill…inappropriate speed does
In relation to the NT’s speed limits, NT’s biggest killer was and still is alcohol (with speed not even in the top 5).
But if you want to be a bit broader, the real cause of ALL accidents comes down to one thing…Poor decision making.
(think about this by relating back to your own incidences and every single excuse you may come up with involves a poor decision made at least once)
Supercujo, David Moir addressed the distance issue. This is what he had to say:
“The average distance travelled by Western Australians by road is very comparable to other states,” said mr Moir.
“The fact we live in a big state does not mean all of us travel from one end of the state to the other.”
Therefore the RAC feels that a “per kilometre travelled” argument doesn’t hold much merit.
A document from the state police in W.A. with road crash/fatality statistics:
http://www.police.wa.gov.au/Po.....ne2008.pdf
It appears that most of the persons killed are male, aged 25 to 30 and drivers of motor vehicles.
Karl,
I understand what David Moir is saying, as I think most people would stay close to city centres. But potentially these people dont represent the driving habits of many of the fatalities.
Of those fatalities, what was their location, what was the distance travelled by the driver on that day and what was the average distance that each of those fatalities travelled each year.
I understand that most people probably don’t travel up and down the coast, but are these people under-represented in the statistics?? Or are the people that actually do travel the longer distances over represented?
Also it would be interesting to see how many are tourists?
If it doesn’t already exist, an Australian Standard for ‘Accident Information Recovery’ should be developed including Speed, Location, Distance Travelled on that Day, Av Distance per year etc etc. This is all easily obtainable info in many cases.
Then we would be able to put together a real picture of accidents from a reliable standard set of accident info
Hugo,
from those statistics you could also say that the regional areas are over-represented compared to metropolitan areas when considering population sizes
It can be concluded from these statistics that most crashes are fatigue related due to the vast distances being covered and probably alcohol. But this wont stop the speed kills nutters / revenue raisers, going on about decreasing the speed limit and introducing more speed cameras.
It’s a bad result for the nation’s slowest drivers.Hey Supercujo, ever tried driving through the Tunnel at the speed limit? Sigh…
There are some good points raised here. Fenno says it’s decision making. Well, yeah. Like the time I decided to push on to Mt Barker from Manjimup instead of resting for half an hour and had a nano-sleep whilst driving around a bend at 90km/h. I also had a minor collision whilst trying to squeeze a truck on a lane merge. Dur.
So, it’s not speed that’s the killer. The 90km/h I was punting the Commodore at was the limit. It comes down to attitude, skills, the right decisions and maturity and when one of those goes on holiday (see above), you’ve just raised your chances of calamity.
Golfschwein…Nations slowest drivers????
WA (like Qld) is experiencing a nice growth spurt due to the mining and infrastructure boom (meaning drivers from all over the country and world). In Queensland they all seem to hog the right hand lane and tailgate. I found with Perth (much better roads than Brissy) there was only two speeds…Flat out and stop. LOL. Perspectives are funny.
How can these passages possibly be correct – they are contradictory?
“Yesterday, a report by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau showed that in the last financial year there were 10.4 road deaths per 100,000 West Australians. Respectively, next worst region was Tasmania”
and
“Only the Northern Territory is up there with us, and that’s no endorsement.”
In fact you haven’t even listed the NT as if its not a state/territory of Australia?
Adam,
NT details weren’t provided. Therefore TAS is the next worse out of information available. We’re not sure where Mr Moir got his details from, but that is the quote we received. We always quote statements verbatim.
The problem is Karl is that the RAC have vested interests in these reports.
Our government is not to blame for these deaths, and its once again proof pathetic and draconian hoon law legistlation doesnt change a thing.
The truth is is that we do drive alot of km’s, and alot of our deaths our outside of the city area.
Yet to see someone die doing a small burnout, but you will continue to see people die from trying to drive too far on roads which arnt the best quality.
Karl,
I understand the quote is verbatim, but it would at least be good practice to point out that these statistics do not include the NT (unless they wrote the whole article for you?)
You also refer to a quote that does mention the NT, so the article makes little sense.
Fair comment. Will keep it in mind. Cheers mate.
Hi Fenno. Yes, perceptions do differ!
I remember driving a hire car in Melbourne about 3 years ago, around from the big bay thing and through St Kilda at about 5 pm on a week day, and they are so on the ball over there in terms of overall concentration and driving up to (but not necessarily over) the speed limit.
Over here, it takes a lot of drivers 2 or 3 suburban blocks (call it 500 metres) to even reach the speed limit!
I’m surprised it wasn’t Adelaide SA – when you look at the way drivers chop n change lanes [Particularly on the Main North Road from Parafield to Gawler] using their telepathic indicators instead of the ones fitted to their cars..
However; to try and put it into some kind of perspective – drivers in WA have more kilometres to travel on rural country roads.. and most people that die on country roads are actually city slickers who aren;t used to driving such long distances at such high speeds.. they’re more used to the 2 hour crawl at an average 15Km/h to travel the 30Km to work.
Agree David have thought about the Helmet thing too.
As u say if it was compulsory like seat belts would be a good thing IMO.
“I remember driving a hire car in Melbourne about 3 years ago, around from the big bay thing and through St Kilda at about 5 pm on a week day, and they are so on the ball over there in terms of overall concentration and driving up to (but not necessarily over) the speed limit.”
… and thus more unforgiving to one another… people get road rage easily here, you do one slight silly thing, and they’ll beep at you for 10mins straight. Sunday is the worst.
In the last 30 years the road toll has dropped by three quarters, despite there being more cars on the road. Yet politicians use this as an excuse for more revenue raising. Calling one of the revenue raising speed cameras ’safety cameras’ is like the nazi’s calling Auschwitz a holiday camp.
Add some race tracks for the public to use either free or cheap, that way people will be able to get used to how they can control their car…
Stuff like if someone nudges you back end of the car on the 110km/h road you should be able to control it better because of all you experiance on the track…
I thought this was simple…????
Proper training is needed. It is too easy to get a licence. The log book is a waste of time because most people just make it all up and learning from drivers who already have bad habits (yes the parents) is only going to pass on the mistakes. Half of the drivers out there dont even know how to set up there driver seat properly so to avoid injury in case of an accident. I believe that kids should have to pass a driving coarse in school with a properly trained instructor. Let them understand and respect drinving and raod conditions. Dont blame the youth, its the older generation who are not teaching them properly.
Tikki,
Clearly the education system is failing too! Can’t help thinking that your english skills put you at about year 4 ps level. Maybe you need to wait until you reach the right age to bother about driver training.