The evidence is coming in that falls in the road toll and the number of traffic accidents in the past five years is not a call for self-congratulation on the part of Australian drivers. Rather it has been a incident of economic recession. This has meant people have cut down on the frequency and length of their car trips and have not replaced their cars as frequently. It has added up to fewer accidents costly less in terms of money, injuries and lives. Alas, it is not evidence that more drivers are voluntarily driving more carefully.
The latest evidence is from the insurance group AAMI which publishes an annual crash index. It shows that as Australia has been coming out of recession over the past three years, the accident rate has increased by 15 per cent. It shows that half the accidents are caused by rear-end collisions and not giving way … in short, driver negligence. Given total accident property costs of $2.6 billion, it is safe to assume that more than $1 billion a year is caused by this sort of driver negligence.
The AAMI index showed that in the past year the accident rate rose from 13.9 per cent to 14.4 per cent. That probably shows longer trips as we come out of the recession and/or more crashes per kilometre.
Driver under 25 were 28 per cent more accident prone than older drivers, and that young males were 5 per cent more likely to crash than male drivers. That, of course, is probably a generous interpretation of young people’s driving records. Many young people do not insure comprehensively and young people are less likely to insure with a company like AAMI than with the NRMA. It is likely that the figure shows an improvement on a more-appalling record of young male drivers in earlier years, and it is likely the improvement has come about through the stick rather than the carrot … random breath-testing, radar and the points system. There are few things more shattering to the young male ego than the loss of a licence.
It may well be that the AAMI crash index is not exactly representative of the driving population as a whole. Some drivers do not insure. Premiums and market knowledge may be such that AAMI attracts a different sort of insurer than other companies or the driver population as a whole. None the less it is likely to be a big enough survey to indicate a trend. That trend is not a satisfactory one, especially when coupled with changes in the law and police practice over the past decade. The law and police practice are tougher and police cover more ground.
Unfortunately, it seems that the death, maiming and destruction caused by Australian drivers is reduced only by force of the police and law or the force of economics … when they cannot afford to drive badly or at all. The evidence indicates that police enforcement helps reduce the toll. We may have imagined that recent reduce tolls showed we are learning to behave ourselves on the road. The AAMI index shows that it was a figment of the recession, not a sustained change in driving behaviour.
It shows that greater effort is needed on driver education and other steps to change driver attitude and that blaming vehicle failure or bad roads is nonsense.
In that context, the ACT move to abandon annual car checks is justified if the savings are put to changing driver attitude.