This is every road death since 1989

Updated

Each of these dots represents a person killed in a road crash in Australia.

48,592 people have died on Australia's roads since 1989.

Traffic injury is the biggest killer of children under 15 and the second-biggest killer of Australians aged between 15 and 24.

Road deaths are largely predictable and preventable — a fact public health experts have sought to underscore by discouraging use of the word "accident" when it comes to road crashes.

Seven in 10 road fatalities are men. Men are more likely than women to drive aggressively and take risks, research shows.

But men also drive more than women. Close to 85 per cent of workers in road freight transport are men. Most spend long hours on the road and drive under pressure.

"Men are overrepresented in all injuries pretty much from the age we start crawling to death," Rebecca Ivers, director of the injury division at The George Institute for Global Health, said.

20,888 weren't driving when they died.

Staying out of the driver's seat is no guarantee of safety.

Pedestrians, passengers and cyclists together make up 43 per cent of deaths. That's nearly the same proportion as drivers, which account for 45 per cent of deaths.

16,905 were under the age of 26.

Young people are nearly twice as likely as older age groups to die in a traffic collision.

People aged between 17 and 25 make up less than 13 per cent of the population but more than 26 per cent of road fatalities since 1989.

The most common age to die on the roads is 18.

If every person killed on Australian roads since 1989 had instead lived to 75, the potential life lost would total roughly 1,761,443 years.

Inexperience and risky behaviour such as speeding or drink and drug driving are among the reasons why road deaths tend to strike in the prime of life.

Young people are also more likely to drive late at night, when fatigue is a bigger problem, and to drive older cars, which have fewer safety features to protect them from death or serious injury in a crash.

These charts show the time and day of deaths, as a percentage of the total for each age group.

Overall, the deadliest time to be on the road is between 3pm and 5pm.

But not for young people. For those aged between 17 and 34 the most dangerous time is the middle of the night on weekends, between 10pm and 2am.

8,792 were not the only person killed in the crash.

Nearly one in 10 crashes kill more than one person. One in 60 kill more than two people.

Australia's two worst crashes both occurred on the Pacific Highway in NSW in 1989. Thirty-five people died on December 22 in the Kempsey bus crash when two buses collided head-on. Twenty-one people were killed in the Cowper bus crash on October 20, when a bus collided with a semi-trailer.

While head-on collisions are perhaps the most widely feared type of crash, road deaths are more likely to involve just one vehicle.

Single vehicles run off the road account for one in three deaths, compared to one in five deaths following a head-on collision and one in five at an intersection, according to national crash statistics.

5,891 were riding a motorbike.



In 2016, motorcycle deaths surpassed passenger deaths for the first time, making motorcyclists the second-most likely type of road user to die in a traffic crash.

Motorcycle deaths have fallen by just 10 per cent since 1989, compared to declines of 73 per cent for passengers, 64 per cent for pedestrians and 45 per cent for drivers.

These charts show the time and day of deaths, as a percentage of the total for each type of road user.

The deadliest times for motorbike riders are weekend afternoons, with deaths spiking between 3pm and 4pm on Saturdays and 1pm and 5pm on Sundays.

For pedestrians, the most dangerous times are between 6pm and 7pm, Wednesday to Saturday.

For cyclists, afternoon peak hour between 4pm and 5pm — when more cars are on the road and drivers are more fatigued — and Saturday morning are the deadliest times.

1,225 were killed in 2017.





Sweeping changes to road safety have cut road deaths by two-thirds since 1970, the worst year for road deaths.

Per capita, Australians are nearly seven times less likely to die from road injury now than in 1970, even though there are four times more cars on the roads.

Safer road and vehicle design, lower speed limits, mandatory seat belts, child restraints and helmets, tougher drink and drug driving penalties and improved post-crash response, among other measures, have all contributed to the sharp decline in road deaths.

But once-plummeting rates of traffic deaths have stagnated and the rate of hospitalised crash injuries continues to rise.

In the decade to 2011, injuries rose by 6 per cent to 152.6 per 100,000 population, according to the most recent Australian Institute of Health and Welfare analysis. This puts them at roughly 27 times the per-capita rate for deaths, up from 16 times in 2002.





Professor Ivers said public health experts were pushing for a new approach that looked at how broader societal factors impact on the road system.

For example, strategies to reduce drug driving would combine road safety measures with programs to tackle the causes of substance abuse, while strategies to reduce fatigued or distracted driving would examine work pressures and the desire to continually remain "connected" through technology.

"It's about getting people around safely," Professor Ivers said, whether by reducing our reliance on cars (for example, through investment in good public transport) or changing the way people live and work.

"We know in road safety that focusing on individual behaviour is not helpful … You actually have to change the system so that when people make mistakes they're not penalised by dying."

Notes about this story

Fatalities and crash statistics for 1989-2017 are from the Australian Roads Death Database, current to December 2017 (accessed January 19, 2018)

Fatalities for 1925-1988 are from the Federal Office of Road Safety publication "The History of Road Fatalities in Australia", Monograph 23, 1998

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Topics: death, road, safety-education, health-policy, road-transport, transport, australia

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