I’ve been poring over the Queensland Government’s publicly available road crash data recently; there’s a lot to take in there so I’ll split what I find into a few instalments. For this outing, I looked at ten years (2001-2010) of data on all reported road crashes* for the entire state. There were 227,570 reported crashes in Queensland during this period.

* where the crash met one of the following criteria:

a person was killed or injured, or

at least 1 vehicle was towed away, or

$2500 or more damage to property other than vehicles was caused.

So, these crash statistics don’t include accidents where there were no (reported) injuries or major damage to other objects, and where all vehicles involved were able to leave under their own power – i.e. your typical ‘prang’.

Nearly all the crash reports were handily geotagged to the nearest few metres. I rounded the geographic coordinates to the nearest thousandth of a degree, ‘binning’ the crashes to points around 110 – 150 metres apart and cross-checking with the street names on the reports. This seemed like a satisfactory spatial resolution to single out the worst ‘black spots’ – and unsurprisingly, the locations with the most crashes were all at intersections involving at least one major road. So, here we go:

5.) Browns Plains Rd, intersection with Grand Plaza Dr, Browns Plains

82 crashes, 11 hospitalisations, 0 fatalities

(This is a curious case – a short stretch of busy arterial road sandwiched between entrances to equally busy shopping complexes. Doesn’t look especially fun)

4.) Ann St, intersection with George St, Brisbane CBD

86 crashes, 19 hospitalisations, 0 fatalities

(Street view of the intersection. You must be in the correct lane to enter the desired freeway on-ramp just past the lights, however little prior indication of this is given and last-minute lane changes are common)

3.) Nerang – Broadbeach Rd, intersection with Bermuda St, Broadbeach Waters

88 crashes, 22 hospitalisations, 0 fatalities

(This intersection is recognised as a major point of congestion. Rush hour traffic camera stills may give you some indication of this)

2.) Beatty Rd, intersection with Granard Rd, Rocklea

91 crashes, 18 hospitalisations, 0 fatalities

(Bonus crash footage)

1.) Captain Cook Hwy, intersection with Mount Milman Dr, Smithfield (near Cairns)



94 crashes, 10 hospitalisations, 0 fatalities

Interesting that there were no fatalities at any of these locations. Then again that makes some sense – one might expect lots of relatively minor accidents at very busy, built-up intersections where rear-endings and similar mishaps are common – these are places where high-speed collisions would be comparatively rare. So where did the greatest number of the 2,925 fatal crashes that happened in Queensland during this ten year period occur? It was actually a three-way tie for a surprisingly low number:

a.) Bruce Hwy, intersection with Tandur Rd, Kybong

23 crashes, 2 hospitalisations, 3 fatalities

(Like the following intersection, this one is on a rural stretch of road with more freedom to attain high speeds)

b.) Bells Creek Rd, intersection with Bruce Hwy, Bells Creek / Landsborough

19 crashes, 1 hospitalisation, 3 fatalities

(This intersection was being upgraded as of March 2014, and should now be just about complete. Safety improvements were cited as a partial basis for the works)

c.) Chambers Flat Rd, intersection with Tamarind St, Marsden

35 crashes, 8 hospitalisations, 3 fatalities

Given three was the highest number of fatalities at any one location (as I’ve defined it) over the ten year period, it’s not overly surprising that none occurred at the busiest crash spots. What’s more surprising is how evenly spread-out road fatalities appeared to be – no one or few intersections were the scene of an unusually high amount of carnage. Spatially grouping the data by given lengths of road segment may yield more concentrated clusters of accidents and fatalities, though that might call for GIS/mapping software – I used Excel and R only.

Take care on the roads!