A continuing high number of road deaths means the Federal Government needs to put renewed focus on road safety in next week’s budget, the Australian Automobile Association (AAA) says.
The target of a 30% reduction in road deaths by 2020 is slipping from the Government’s grasp, and requires a renewed budget commitment, the AAA says.
The AAA released its Benchmarking of the Performance of the National Road Safety Strategy (NRSS) report which tracks progress against the strategy’s 30% target. All Australian governments committed to this strategy in 2011.
The report finds that 1240 lives were lost on our roads in the year to March 2017, nine fewer than for the same period last year. This is a decrease of just 0.7%, and is 111 more than in the same period two years ago, which highlights the lack of progress to the 2020 target, the AAA says.
The road trauma extends further than fatalities. About 42,000 Australians are seriously injured on our roads each year. That’s 800 Australians seriously injured and 24 killed on our roads weekly.
At a time when new vehicles and roads have never been safer, we need to understand why 40 years of road safety improvement appears to be at risk of being reversed, the AAA says.
As part of its 2017-18 Budget submission, the AAA has called on the Australian Government to establish an inquiry into the causes of road deaths and to better understand the trends in serious injuries.
Such an inquiry is an important, urgent, and low cost step the Government can take towards reducing the human suffering, and the billions in annual economic costs, caused by crashes, the AAA says.
Visit aaa.asn.au/reports for more.
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