It has been a fairly good Christmas-New Year on the roads this season, comparatively speaking.
What! Surely, there has been “”carnage” on the roads. It has been horrific, etc.
Well, perception is different from reality. In recent years about 1900 people die on the roads in Australia each year. That is an average of 5.2 per day. The holiday period runs for 17 days from the first minute of December 24 till the last minute of January 9 – this Tuesday at midnight.
At time of writing it is Friday evening 13 days in. We should have had 68 dead, on average. We had had 70. This is the same as the ordinary death rate. Yet this was at Christmas-New Year when everyone is travelling great distances away from home or driving around half tanked. If you take NSW out of the equation, every state and territory had lower per-day death rates on the roads over the Christmas-New Year holiday than during the year as a whole.
Yet this year the message seems to have been that the toll was horrific and beyond acceptable limits. There are several reasons for this perception. The first is that the NSW toll was way above average. An disproportionately large amount of media comes out of Sydney and is NSW-centric. The ABC, SBS, The Australian, The Australian Financial Review and the Sydney Morning Herald mostly come out of Sydney. These are opinion-leading mouthpieces. So despite the fact that every other state and territory had death tolls well below the ordinary daily rate, the perception is one of mayhem.
Secondly, not much is happening in December-January. You can tell because the Middle East is on the front pages. So the road toll makes good television and newspaper images to fill the space between the ads at a time when parliaments and courts are in recess and business is largely on holiday.
Thirdly, in NSW, the state with the worst toll, a horror advertising campaign was run. The campaign – involving a small child on holiday – was heaviest in mid-evening television, the time young males are out on the town. But the campaign highlighted not just road-safety, but the fact that road-safety was not happening.
Fourthly, there is the great quote attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in Mark Twain’s autobiography: “”There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
What are we measuring here? Do we measure how safely we drive? Or do we measure how dangerous is it to go out on the road as a pedestrian, cyclist, motorcyclist, driver or passenger? The absolute toll compared year to year can be misleading. What if the population and or the number of cars rose? What economic conditions caused an increase or decrease in the number of kilometres travelled? Or if weather or an influx of right-side driving tourists intervened?
The figures for 2000 are just in. Alas, 1818 people died, 51 more than in 2000. What does this tell us? Well, the toll rose by about the same percentage as the population between 2 and 3 per cent, but it is not statistically significant.
For argument’s sake about the same number of people died. But what if we travelled more because economic conditions were good? Surely that would mean travel was becoming safer?
One thing we know, is that the toll has been getting better on every measure since 1975. In 1975 5.8 people died per 10,000 vehicles (1.5 in 1997); 3.8 people per 100 million kilometres travelled (1.2); and 28.6 per 100,000 population (9.5). The absolute toll has halved since 1975 the real risk is less than a third.
We are doing OK. But there is no reason why we cannot aim for zero deaths. People are despairing because the toll after going down steadily for two decades, appears to be levelling out.
But we know that Australia can do even better. We know this because one jurisdiction has done better by far than the other states and territories and has continued to get better at a faster rate than the other seven.
Did you know that the ACT is the safest jurisdiction on earth when it comes to road deaths when measured according to the number of vehicles on the road per head — 0.9 per 10,000 vehicles. Australia is 1.5, Korea 11.5, Hungary 5.5, Sweden, Norway, UK, Switzerland and Japan between 1.3 and 1.5.
The ACT has been safer than all other Australian jurisdictions every year since the measure was taken in 1975. Yet the ACT was a late-comer to seat-belts, random-breath-testing, 0.05, radar, speed cameras and red-light cameras. Could it be there are other factors rarely mentioned in the road-safety context. The ACT stands out from other jurisdictions on other grounds – highest education level, highest incomes, highest sport participation, lowest unemployment and so on.
When you look at country-by-country comparisons poorer, low-income countries do worse once they reach a level where they have significant car numbers.
It may well be that high general levels of education are as important in reducing road deaths as specific education in the form of the advertising that proved so ineffective in the holiday period. Yes; keep up the policing, but we might need to look further afield.