Road deaths in Australia

Ease up Shaker. Where is the fact about tough policing working? "Its always been the same".....Another silly assumption. He has already stated that the stats have IMPROVED..Not stayed the same. Off course death is death..same as life is life..Just stating the obvious.

Better roads, driver education, annual roadworthies, policing, commercials and many other factors have helped the stats for deaths go down. I think I read that for every death there are about 10 serious injuries (not sure). Its no wonder that a single accident can effect many people in a community.

I meant the way deaths are reported has always been the same.

Bigfish, The "fact about tough policing working" can perhaps be found in the referenced news report here..... "Professor Max Cameron from Monash University's Accident Research Centre in Melbourne says greater enforcement of road rules has also made a big difference."

The related linked story is also interesting: Large-scale TAC study to examine factors in serious road crashes.

Shaker,
I am not heading anywhere with it and thanks for informing me a death is a death. Does that mean they have passed away, died, expired, rung down the curtain and gone out the back door or joined their maker.

I have no problems with the coppers and come in contact with them more than most. In fact they were playing on the Greenacre and Prossie pads yesterday doing safety checks.
What I am saying is statistics don't always give the true picture.

Example is, say 3000 people were badly hurt in 1970 and 5000 nearly expired from accidents it would be better to see what the stats are in 2013. So lets say 1000 were killed in 2013 and 10000 were badly hurt.

I am not saying this is the case but it paints an entirely different picture.

This is why it would be far better to give both stats together.

Good raw stats but no real facts on what has contributed to this, which is the big missing piece of the picture and would make for interesting reading. Governments will without doubt push their 'facts' that one of their key revenue streams is a major contributor.

This will be sold to the voters as a reason to expand this revenue stream and anybody that argues against it will be demonised as not wanting to save lives.

Speed enforcement, yes absolutely need it. Speed enforcement for anything under say 5kph over the limit is nothing but free income and likely to cause more deaths than it saves.Speed Distraction

Do we really need to know? There is no doubt in my mind that the roads are safer now than in the 70's. The possibility of dying on your next trip was way more apparent back then, not so much now. You do have to wonder about the 1kph over rubbish though.

1970's, pre compulsory seat belts.
Also the era of muscle cars like the GTS Monaros and GT Falcons.
Bad combo, along with so many one lane bridges etc etc on many of our main highways.

Yes, would be good to compare % of deaths from say 1970 and 2013.
Maybe the introduction of better vehicle safety has saved lives, but increased injuries / disablement.

There are a great many factors that have resulted in the improvements in road deaths and injuries.

In 1970, the road between brisbane & the gold coast was mostly a minimum width, undivided, two lane road with dirt verges ( other major roads nation wide where similar).

As mentioned seat belts where not yet compulsory and there where not yet australian design rules as we now know them.
Unless the vehicle was an exotic european make there where not even side intrusion bars in the doors likewise the notion of rollover protection, crumple zones or any sort of passenger protection was absent.
The vast majority of cars sold came equiped with crossply tyres and many of the soo called high performance cars where tretcherous as hell to handle

In the 70's an ambulance was well named as a "meat waggon", many where staffed by a single man ( yes man). The notion of a paramedic, had not even been developed in the US.
The ambulance attendant had about as much skill and equipment available as we would expect from a current day advanced first aider.
Pick em up as best you can stop em bleading if you can, keep em breathing and get em to hospital as fast as you can.

When the patent got to hospital...if they made it....emergency medice certainly was not what it is now.

As for helicopters and all that stuff that comes to play when there is some distance.....if it was a big deal there may have been a couple of cases of the flying doctor landing on the highway.....but not the aerial evaculations we see these days.

A great many people survive road crashes due to the medical improvements alone.

sure enforcement has a role to play.....but this rediculous heavy handed low range enforcement is doing nothing but raise funds.

In fact as has been mentioned before.....the effectivness of enforcement has gone backward in recent years because only a narrow range of offences is being activly enforced.


Any notional improvements due to enforcement will be easily off set by the reduction in driving skill level of the general populace.

Back in the 70's less people drove and even less of those drove long distances.
The vehicles of the time required more skill, strength and awareness to drive. Automatic gearboxes where far less common, many vehicles had no syncro in first and power steering was for the rich.

OH and of course the roads surfaces where nowhere near as good...dirt roads where still very common in the suburbs and even some of the major routes.

So people had by necessity to have better driving skills.


It is unlikly that the general public will be told the full story.....as we see from this forum..so many simply do not want to know.


As for acedemics and universities...oh please.....these guys have to get their funding from somewhere.

cheers

Bantam, I don't know what the 1970's has to do with it.
The referenced article stated as follows:

"New figures show the number of road deaths in Australia has dropped by almost a quarter during the past decade.

The Road Deaths Australia Summary reports on road fatalities from 2004 until 2013.

The results show a 25 per cent drop in all types of road deaths. When population changes are taken into account the drop increases to 35 per cent."

That improvement is just in the last decade and there has not been significant change in vehicles, road construction or ambulance & emergency medical in that time as you described.

As usual, we are wandering far from the point of the founding post by 'Slow One' in an attempt to invalidate it.

There seems to be have been a bit of reference to the 1970s in this thread. Mandatory wearing of seatbelts was introduced in Victoria in December 1970, amid predictions of decapitations, dismemberment & people being trapped in their vehicles, not unlike some of the predictions here that lower speed limits will kill drivers because they have to concentrate longer!

50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, 90s whatever...each decade has seen substantial improvements in the safety of vehicles, the standards of the roads they operate and the level of medical care.

In the 70's it was the introduction of seat belts, in the 80's it was the introduction of side intrusion and number of other body and interiour modifications including the passing of the all metal dash board.

The 80's saw ADRs starting to bite hard.......there are some realy significant changes to vehicles beginning in the 80's

The improvemsnts of the 80's have not been surpassed in the multiple levels of increased safety till recently with the the package that included common introduction of airbags and ABS brakes.

every decade there have been significant life saving improvements

My father fitted seat belts in our 1954 morris oxford early in the 60's...it is one of my earliest automotive recolections.
He also fitted new fangled bumper indicators to replace the semaphore indicators.

Comparisons with the 70's and current just show the improvements dramaticly.

The only thing that has realy change in enforcement has been the finance centered policing.....not an i,mprovement in safety at all.

cheers

A reduction in deaths of 25% in a decade is fairly dramatic!

..

It is also interesting (and understandable) the comparos showing increases in injuries . . .

But, we are certainly trending the right way with fatalities, looking at those ABS graphs . . .


.


I imagine we are still heading that way since 2003, the latest year that those graphs represent.
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The introduction of airbags alone may acount for a large portion of that increase.

Air bags reduce the head injury risk considerably and quite a bit of the upper torseau injury.

in the past inspite of seat belts a lot of peope smacked their heads on the steering wheel or the side pillar in accidents...and the chest still moves forward quite a bit even with a set belt.

another factor in the last 10 years may be the fairly sudden affordability of new cars and the older less safe vehicles being taken off the road.


there are a lot of us driving 10 or 20 year old vehicles and the safety measures introduced in the past may take a decade to be represented in the crash statistics.

cheers

The selection criteria has changed. In 1970 it was "he's dead mate, looks like he hit that tree doin' at least a hundred mile an hour...what do ya reckon?" Now we have scientific instruments that come to the conclusion that he's dead and the car hit the tree at 158.5 kph. The Go Pro camera on the dash helps...

I'd be interested to hear of ways the statistics could be fiddled.

Yes Freshstart, as they say 'Lies, d@mn lies, and statistics'.
Authority always has a way to manipulate numbers to suit their agendas.

Just concentrating on a simple side by side comparo, ie road deaths in 1970 was 3,976, in 2013 1,633, it is certainly a major reduction, and looks like we are doing the right thing since then.

But adding seat belt legislation, driver education, peer pressure, car safety, road safety (overall !), tougher laws for drink driving, speeding, and YES reductions in speed limits, and it's clear manipulation is easy.

I don't think anyone could actually measure the true reduction per capita taking all these factors into account, making it even easier to play with %'s . . .

http://www.abs.gov.au/Ausstats/ABS@.nsf/Previousproducts/1301.0Feature%20Article302005?opendocument&tabname=Summary&prodno=1301.0&issue=2005&num=&view=

Need to copy / paste that ABS link :/

Or insert the link using the Insert Link tab..


ABS stats

Yes, more vehicles, more drivers, more kilometres travelled nationally,

Contemporary Reducers of road toll - Electronic/digital policing, better road engineering, better vehicle to road systems of tyres, brakes, and the big one no one is seeing..the same crashes still occur..but they MORE SURVIVABLE thanks to 4 and 5 star vehicle safety construction and systems.

Negatives (increasing) contributors to road toll - unreported/unidentified suicides, illicit drug driving, Darwinian achievers.

Mike

Back in the dark ages of 1970 they may have counted the victims that died six months later, or the pedestrian who was hit by a branch of the tree that was knocked over. But today they decided they were not to be counted.

A truck hits a train on a level crossing. People in the train pass away. The train people would say the deaths were road deaths and the road people would say the deaths were train deaths. I like that one. A road accident caused a train accident???? So who gets the casualty count?

As far as I know, they do include victims that die later due to the injuries received in any road crash or pedestrian incident.

But not if the driver has had a heart attack and that was the cause of the accident.
What if the heart attack victim hit a pedestrian and killed them as they veered off the road ?

I would have thought the tree branch death of a pedestrian caused by a vehicle accident would have also counted in the road toll.

The train one is interesting though, pax on the train and to include in road toll or not.
Obviously if the truck driver died, they would be added to the road toll.

Yeh well unless we can actually get a case by case break down, we will never know how accurate the road toll is.

Of how that applies to road safety issues.

There was a bloke killed a few weeks ago in a mountain bike accident......this bloke came belting down a hill in the forest and broke his kneck..or some such.

nowhere near any gasetted road and not a motor vehicle...but he has been counted in the road toll.....go figure.

Yes, the matter of vehicle suicides has been raised and in the country areas these would count for quite a few every year.
But we will never know....this is an attractive method of suicide, because it is fast and hard to prove as suicide..so the family probably still gets the insurance money.


Thn there is the matter of suicidally wreckless behaviour....people who don't specifically intend to kill themselves...but care very little if they die.........there will be a bit of that about that we will never know about.


Then there are the medical deaths that occur on roads or in vehicles.....someone has a heart attack and ides...if that is in a vehicle or on the road it would probably be counted as road toll.


Like any statistic...without the why and the how ...the road toll means nothing.

cheers

Some forumites might think data managers and statisticians don't know the importance of comparing apples with apples but that's a long way from the truth. They know far more about the importance of baselines and normalisation of data than a few on here give them credit for. They also apply rigorous modelling methods to work out accuracy parameters and confidence levels.

Whether such things are reported is largely irrelevant because the public is only interested in what stats are saying in broad terms, but it's pretty obvious that they aren't understood by "expert" forum detractors. As we all know, some people will misuse or misinterpret stats - doesn't mean the stats or the methodologies are wrong, or meaningless.

The Vic Transport Accident Commission has an online tool TAC crash database which you can use to show raw ? accident data from 2001-2013. Can't post images but you can generate your own graphs and see the (raw) trends for a range of parameters - road user type, ages, gender, location etc. I haven't looked at the metadata but I doubt the numbers have been normalised for population etc so beware when interpreting them.

Due to factors of vehicle design and medical attention the over all reduction in trauma from individual vehicle crashes has reduced considerably.

In a given situation, comparing a 70's vehicle with a current vehicle.

in a similar crash that would cause a death, in a 70;s vehicle people my simply walk away.

A few years ago, I cam upon a crash in the freeway.....some young muppet was going too fast and got out of shape.....the vehicle bounced from barrier to barrier and involved another vehicle on one of the bounces.

The primary vehicle did not have a straight pannel on it or two wheels pointing in the same direction...it was a total write off and a mess.
the second vehicle was pretty badly beaten up.


ALL walked away without a scratch...thanks to airbags seat belts and modern design ...if that would have been the 70's there would have been 3 dead no question.


One of the big issues of vehicles of the past was the horrific injuries people recieved due to the bad design.

There where several vehicle that aven after seat belts where introduced had a reputation for horrible lower limb injuries.
The mini had a bad reputation for folding up the floor and mashing the feet.

ceretain US derived vehicles with metal glove box lids had the reputation for chopping people off at the knees when the glove box popped open in a crash.

I spent several weeks on crutches in primary school, because I bashed my knee against a metal window winder in a very minor crash.
Just the change in the shape and construction of window winders and dorr handles will have reduced injuries considerably.

To total package of death and injury has improved out of sight due to better vehicle design.

The total level of survivability and recoverey from injury will have improved out of sight due to medical advances.

By brother was in very real danger of loosing a leg after a motorcycle crash in the 70's.....fracture treatment and bone grafting methods and services have improved considerably since then.
His surgeon has told him straight that if he had treated the injury he had in the 70's with modern methods..he would not be replacing his knees now.....he most likley would not have had the 20 odd years of pain hat resulted from the misalignment after the injury.


the notion that people are being badly injured rather than dying is simply false.

People are walking away where they would have died and having very minor injuries where they would have been maimed.


you realy do have to be trying hard to get killed or serioulsy injured in a modern car.

cheers

G'day Bantam

You say "the notion that people are being badly injured rather than dying is simply false". All Slow one was saying in his original post was that it would be good to see the figures.

Your points are all good, and make sense i.e. it is reasonable to assume that serious injury is also decreasing, but sound decisions and sound policy should be made on sound statistical evidence, not anecdotal evidence.

Some replies (not your's) are critical of the use of statistics, but it's scientific and statistical analysis that has initiated many of the vehicle and road safety, and medical, progress that we have seen since the 70s, or even in the last decade.

Cheers
John

50 lines to state the obvious. Nobody would dispute that there have been numerous significant factors involved. As you say John, thankfully society has moved on from decision making by anecdote.

Hoyks, There are moves afoot to turn the spotlight on "all the other stuff". Did you see my link above? I'll repeat it here..... "Large-scale TAC study to examine factors in serious road crashes."

So (I hope I got this right !!), that shows that, in NSW :

In 1970 3.75% of people were killed compared to injured.
In 2010 0.84 % . . . . . . . . "
A significant reduction on deaths to injuries.

It also shows that, in NSW the number of injuries for total accidents :

1970 - 37.5%
2010 - 58.2%
An increase in injuries (assume both minor and major) per accident, but still not as major increase as reduction in deaths vs injury.

I suppose this could be attributed to :

Better vehicle safety.
Better medical care all round.
Faster medical care (ambo attendance, chopper rescue, etc).
Seat belts.

These factors (and more) could see more people living (but with injuries), rather than dying on the roads.

Sorry, gotta go now, head hurting after calculations :D

FFS ? Don't get all upset there Terry, the OP is all about stats :)

How they can be altered with a simple change, and how they can show up interesting facts to explain the OPs initial inquiry, which was 'flaws in the stats' (second para).

..... and don't let their parents teach them to drive in the first place, as the late, great Barry Sheene once said, " parents hand down bad driving habits like family heirlooms" !

Now that is probably a bloody good idea. 3 years experience on the road and then a retest. See if they have a real grasp of how to drive. Re visit the road laws and if they are proficient..off they go. If they fail, another year on the p plates until a further resit of the test and a drive.

Worth thinking about.

Its not the young people than need the retest, it is the older drivers.

I have been retested in the last few years due to a licence upgrade.

I thought I new my regs pretty well...and I did.....but there where still a couple of things I was not aware off.

The governments are very lax on informing the public of changes on road rules...they are all keen on vote buyers or justifying fund raising.

But generally informative information for the public is a non event.

Most people are not as conciencious as a few of us with keeping up our knoweledge of the road rules.....others never grasped them in the first place.

Ignorance of road rules and principles of driving is much higher in those who have had their licence over 10 years and the longer people have their licence the worse it gets.


so how many recon you will pass a current licence test without help.

Cheers

Well, Hell must have frozen over because for once I agree with you!
I think that the authorities have a obligation to keep us informed of road rule changes.
In this computer age, it would be so easy to include rule changes for the preceding year with our registration renewals.

Bantam,
believe or not, I totally agree with what you said.

respectfully the talk of newer drivers is the biggest lot of rubish trotted out by fuddy duddies my age

Kids these days dont get thier licenses out of weetie boxes like we used to

they hit the roads far more prepared for the much busier roads and far more powerfull cars than we were

One major difference, we respected the police, & no we were far from angels!

I should have read on before replying above Allan as I now see you've covered the point. There's always someone who thinks he knows better than qualified, knowledgeable experts or thinks he's found an angle which no-one else has ever considered.

Wayne,
if you are answering my post I would like to know what view as I don't have one. What I did asked in the post was, a bit more info about the statistics so they paint a very clear picture.

Is that move on or move over.