The rising road toll: why now is a good time for you to be extra careful

Where’s our progress? In the past decade, Australia’s famous leadership on road deaths has fizzled out. It looks like we got down to about 1000 deaths a year and collectively said, well, that’s enough.

Note that this chart includes data for all of 2023. To obtain an annual figure, I tripled the deaths by the end of April. Hopefully we don’t get that high, but unfortunately it is likely to be a conservative projection as usually the first four months of the year have slightly fewer deaths than the next two four-month periods.

What’s going on? Why didn’t things improve much more in 2020 when half the country was in lockdown, and why is the line going up post-lockdown? What about all the new safety tech in modern cars — does it really help?

Is this just what the road toll will look like when we are at the safety frontier but we have a growing population? Or can it be attributed to the rampant inflation of vehicle sizes, such as the popular American-size trucks?

We can’t answer all these questions in this article, but we can get some clues. Breaking down the data by road user type, we can see that cycling deaths are just as high now as two decades ago. That’s got something to do with more people cycling, of course.

Motorcycling defies the pattern of every other road user group, getting more dangerous, while pedestrians are dying in smaller numbers than a decade ago.

That’s certainly a hint that the problem isn’t just about vulnerable road users. It’s not RAMs rolling over pedestrians that explains the lack of progress. Meanwhile, single-vehicle crashes are rising compared with multiple-vehicle crashes, so we can’t necessarily say the lack of progress in the road toll is due to Hiluxes crashing into Corollas and killing the smaller car’s occupants.

The rise in fatal single-vehicle accidents over the period might suggest that the bigger vehicles in our fleet aren’t keeping us safer. It is certainly the case that they are more likely to tip over and need more stopping distance. If you buy a massive ute thinking it will make you safe, that’s likely to be a false assumption.

Age group

By age group, the risk has shifted. Young hoons are no longer as much of a menace to themselves as they once were. Indeed, young people are a much smaller percentage of fatal crashes than before. But don’t be misled by the chart; they are still most at risk given that the age bracket is much narrower.

Pedestrians

Pedestrian deaths are down in the past few years, but there is a clear pattern for them: the time of year matters. As this chart below shows, May is the worst time of year for pedestrian deaths. If you’re driving home today, take extra care.  

But why is this so? Is it because the days are darker but the weather has not yet got so bad as to make walking unpleasant?

If that were the case you’d expect the situation to be worse in southern states where the days get shorter more dramatically when winter starts. I checked the stats by state, and there’s some evidence of that, but NSW is much worse than Victoria, which is not what you’d expect.

But then I remembered the big problem with Sydney: its longitude. The capital of NSW perches out on the extreme eastern edge of its time zone, leading to very early dusks. The sun will set in Sydney at 5pm today, meaning a lot of people leaving work are getting home in the gloaming — or indeed total darkness. The next two months will be full of even earlier sunsets, including the winter solstice when the sun sets at 4.53pm.

Could the extra pedestrian deaths be centred on the commute home? As the next chart shows, the answer is yes.

The intersection of mild weather and early sunsets means lots of pedestrians on busy roads in low-light conditions, leading to lots of deaths. And remember that for every pedestrian fatality, there are lots of people permanently maimed: broken bones, lost limbs, traumatic brain injuries. They aren’t even in these stats.

Melbourne has shorter May days than Sydney because of its more southerly latitude. But the light is lost in the morning — Melbourne enjoys more evening light than Sydney, because it is relatively westerly in the time zone. The extra evening light means students and workers have more chance to get home before dark.

In Melbourne today the sun will set at 5.17pm today and 5.07pm on the solstice. That slight difference probably explains why the May effect is less pronounced in Melbourne, combined of course with the weather that deters pedestrians earlier in the year.

This data hints at possible improvements that could lower the road toll: better street lighting in areas that are dangerous in the early evening. It also highlights a bigger point: the progress in reducing the road toll that we used to obtain is still possible — we just need to choose to pursue it.