The Australian Automobile Association has begun a new road safety campaign revealing the names and faces behind crash statistics.
Describing the story of road trauma as “often told in numbers and percentages”, the Why Safe Matters campaign aims at connecting road trauma to the friends and families affected by it, while pressing the federal government to act.
Why Safe Matters is primarily a pre-formatted letter which can be sent directly to local MPs to tell them of someone’s connection to road tragedy.
The letter highlights to local members of parliament “it is unacceptable that 100 Australians are hospitalised every day due to a road crash”.
Even worse, with 100 dying on Australian roads every month – also explained in the MP letter – the maths suggest 12,000 Australians will die on our wide open roads before 2028.
The AAA highlights the official inquiry into the National Road Safety Strategy which found “a lack of Federal Government leadership is a key reason for our stalled progress.”
Nearly 7200 hospitalised injuries have occurred since the inquiry was reported on September 12, and over 38,000 people were hospitalised for road-related injuries in 2015-16 – four people every hour. At the time of publishing, exactly 231 fatalities have occurred in Australian road crashes since September 12.
The AAA has used a number of road crash disasters as prime examples of why “it’s time our politicians stepped up to coordinate a systematic national approach to road safety.”
One example includes the “good Samaritan mum” who was hit by a car while trying to help a motorcycle rider, and a crash on Melbourne’s Western Ring Road which saw a crane truck hit a light-truck and killed a 35-year-old man from Hoppers Crossing while his friend watched in shock from the driver’s seat.
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