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KILSBY AUSTRALIA | transport policy, planning and management advice |
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The Road Toll
The Road Toll in Perspective - "warlike casualties"? Otto Ulrich, writing in The Greening of Urban Transport (1990), suggests that : "The most scandalous effect of pollution by motorised individual transport is the killing and maiming of people on a warlike scale ... Presumably it will remain a puzzle to later generations how a society could come to terms with a technology which demands human sacrifice in such vast numbers." Is this colourful over-statement or fair comment? Worldwide, road accidents account for about half a million deaths a year and fifteen million injuries, so it is not as outrageous a claim as it may at first sound. The World Health Organisation recently revised its methods of assessing global health risks, introducing the concept of Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs). This recognises that some health threats disable and reduce quality of life rather than kill outright. On this basis, the top two threats to world health emerge as mental illness and road accidents, rather than the previous champs (tuberculosis, cholera). The road toll is a particular problem in developing countries with fast-rising vehicle ownership without concomitant safety standards. What about for Australia ? Data to check out Ulrich's statement are readily available, from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and the Australian War Memorial websites. Table 1 shows Australian dead and wounded from four major conflicts of the last century. It also shows fatalities and injuries requiring hospitalisation for road accidents in the period 1990-1997. (The toll before 1990 was significantly higher and has been ignored).
Table 1 : Australians killed and wounded in significant 20th century military conflicts and on Australian roads 1990-1997.
While the definitions of military wounded and accident-victim hospitalised are not strictly compatible, it is probably a reasonable first-order approximation to compare them. Table 2 shows the equivalent annual average toll from the figures in Table 1.
Table 2 : Annualised toll for significant 20th century military conflicts and road use 1990-1997.
Table 2 shows that the First World War was in a class of its own for carnage. The Second World War was highly dangerous for the Australian population, but much closer to the same order of magnitude as the road toll for the period 1990-1997. Allowing for the fact that the Australian population has roughly doubled in the intervening period, it seems that for injuries the roads are as dangerous as was the Second World War. However the war was much more likely to produce fatalities - which is not surprising, considering that the resources of several hostile nations were focussed on achieving exactly that effect. The road toll is of course spread across the whole population, with the young and old included and perhaps over-represented, while the war toll shown is limited to serving men and women. (Update : "more people were killed and injured on Australian roads between 1939 and 1946 than as a result of the war" - Australian College of Road Safety). Table 3 identifies the number of pedestrians and cyclists in the 1990-1997 road toll. The annual toll for such users easily exceeds that of the lesser conflicts shown in Table 1 and Table 2.
Table 3 : Toll of vulnerable road users on Australia Roads 1990-97
It is notable that road safety initiatives tend to focus on the safety of the vehicle occupants - air bags, rear seat belts, crash barriers, road straightenings or widenings, and so on. Measures to improve the safety of the vulnerable - lower speed limits, separate cycle facilities and so on - are less evident. Cyclists in particular sometimes suffer from an implicit attitude that because cycling is clearly dangerous (a curious use of English - the large heavy fast things which hit cyclists are surely the dangerous element in the system), it is partly their own fault for being there when accidents occur. Courts sometimes impose laughably lenient penalties on those responsible for cyclist or pedestrian deaths or injuries*. This attitude is unacceptable. On equity grounds the first priority should be to protect the vulnerable while doing what they are entitled to be doing and doing it without imposing any danger others. * eg news report 1 August 2000. A UK truck driver who knocked down and killed a cyclist while distracted by his mobile phone ringing ("I just didn't see him. I just took my eyes off the road ...") was fined £500 ($A1250) and banned from driving for a year. Three days before this accident he had been stopped and fined by police for using a mobile phone while driving one-handed. The defence argued that because the cyclist had not been wearing a crash helmet, this "might have had an effect on the outcome". back to topThe Road Toll in Perspective - Causes of death 1980-1990 The accuracy of the following table cannot be guaranteed, as its source is lost in the mists of time.
Vulnerable Road Users Congratulations to AustRoads for starting to report road safety in a very interesting way. The table on the following page gives a breakdown of 1998 fatalities by road user type and area. It comes from Road Facts 2000, the annual report on the road systems of Australia and New Zealand. "Urban" is defined as any area having a speed limit of less than 100kph. The ABS Survey of Motor Vehicle Use showed that only 31% of vehicle kilometres of travel was undertaken in rural areas. Fatalities by road user type and area - Australia 1998
Slightly re-arranging this data gives a fatality picture as below.
Clearly rural roads are relatively lethal for vehicle users, accounting for 58% of the vehicle user deaths but only 31% of the vehicle travel. Motor cyclists are a unique category, being both vehicle users and vulnerable. At 13% of all motorised user deaths, they are greatly over-represented in the fatality statistics relative to the proportion of travel for which they account. Use of any powered device that greatly amplifies individual mobility (trains and planes as well as cars) carries some small degree of risk and vehicle users can be considered implicitly to accept this, in their choice of travel mode. But do they have the right to risk the lives of others who have not made this choice? Pedestrians and cyclists are generally ordinary people going about their legitimate business without threatening anyone else. Being killed or injured by motor vehicles while walking or riding a bike is not just "bad luck". We allow it to happen. It is right and proper that the toll of the vulnerable always be reported as a separate element of the road toll from that of vehicle users. It is difficult to think of any other preventable public health threat - pyschopaths with automatic weapons, toxic contamination, exposed high-voltage cables, sharks, unfenced swimming pools - that could claim over 350 victims per year nationally (without counting the injured as well), mostly in urban areas, many of them children or older people, and yet not be the subject of public outcry followed by draconian policy action. 4WD Accident Record The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has released a monograph on the accident record of Four-Wheel-Drive vehicles. The table below summarises the performance in 1998. In 1998 4WDs were involved in crashes accounting for 12.1% of all road fatalities, while 4WD mileage was 9.4% of total vehicle mileage in 1998. The majority of 4WD crashes (68% in 1998) occur on rural roads. Road Users Fatally Injured in Crashes Involving 4WD Vehicles 1998
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