AN ambitious plan to halve the number of Australian road deaths is in tatters, with a fourth consecutive national toll increase marking the worst result since the advent of seatbelts.
Sadly, 1300 people were killed on the nation’s roads in 2024, up from 1258 the previous year and a 12-year high.
A landmark 2020 federal strategy to slash deaths by 2030 is “wildly off-track”, according to the Australian Automobile Association (AAA).
Instead of reducing fatalities by half, they have jumped 18.5 per cent in five years, its Benchmarking the Progress of the National Road Safety Strategy report reveals.
Although wearing a safety harness in the front seat of cars became compulsory in Australia in 1969 and was required on all seats by 1971, the toll has been increasing at a rate not seen since 1966.
No Australian jurisdiction is on track to meet its agreed targets under the strategy, says AAA Managing Director Michael Bradley.
For many of the KPIs listed, governments are still to even collect the data needed to measure their progress.
The peak motoring body says politicians need to act to reverse the “road trauma crisis” by adopting a globally recognised road-quality assessment system as a tool to guide smarter road investment decisions.
“We must use data and evidence about crashes, the state of our roads and the effectiveness of police traffic enforcement to establish what is going wrong on our roads and create more effective interventions,” Mr Bradley said.
Unsurprisingly, the AAA research shows NSW had the highest 2024 toll with 340 deaths, but the number of fatalities in the nation’s most populous state was unchanged from the previous year despite the best efforts of authorities to stem the carnage.
Year-on-year increases were recorded in Queensland (deaths up 9%), Western Australia (17%), the Northern Territory (87%) and the ACT (175%).
