And while a disproportionate number of people are dying on rural roads compared with those in the city and the suburbs, road deaths in country areas have plummeted by almost a third in the past year. For the first time since the Transport Accident Commission started keeping track of the state’s road toll in 1987, no road deaths were recorded in the Moorabool and Macedon Ranges shires near Ballarat. That’s a significant improvement from last year, when there were six road deaths in Moorabool and four road deaths in the Macedon Ranges. On average four road deaths a year are recorded in each municipality. Macedon MP Mary-Anne Thomas said the zero figure for the area was a great result that showed "having a zero road toll is an achievable goal".

"Without doubt there’s more work to do to fix our country roads but this result is absolutely heading in the right direction," she said. The TAC’s Samantha Cockfield said the drop was partly thanks to road safety strategies. “We really hit our strides last year in terms of our infrastructure work and enforcement programs and we are starting to reap the rewards of that work,” she said. “You are four to five times more likely to be killed on one of those high speed regional roads than you are in metropolitan Melbourne so we really went about trying to change that.” Ms Cockfield, who is the government body’s road safety director, said a large proportion of road deaths in rural and regional areas were from single-vehicle crashes involving cars that had slammed into trees or poles. She said more than 1500 kilometres of flexible barriers had been installed on high-traffic and high-risk rural roads in recent years to stop such crashes.

“The barriers have been hit over 3000 times this year, but they catch drivers like a net and they just drive away.” Ms Cockfield said the Hume Freeway, where there were seven deaths a year on average, had been one of the first locations bounded by the barriers. “And as far as I know, nobody has been killed on the Hume Freeway this year,” she said. “They make a difference.” Of the 211 deaths on the state’s roads in 2018, 97 were drivers, 38 were pedestrians, 37 were motorcyclists or pillion riders, 33 were passengers and six were cyclists. There was a big drop in the number of drivers and passengers killed on the state’s roads last year, but there was a slight increase in the number of pedestrians fatalities compared with 2017.