… 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

“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?

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.

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

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.

“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.