ADDRESSING road trauma is becoming increasingly politicised and one of Australia's top medical experts wants bold changes to cut the toll.
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Despite the federal government and ministers from each state agreeing to the 12 recommendations outlined in the inquiry into the national road safety strategy 2011-20 in September last year, there has been a selective uptake as hundreds of people continue to die on the nation's roads each year.
Each year across Australia more than 1200 people are killed and 44,000 are hospitalised as a result of road accidents. In Victoria 244 people have died on the state's roads in the year to date, compared to 190 last year and shockingly, 28 people who have died on Victorian roads this year were not wearing seat belts.
The inquiry was undertaken by a number of experts in the field of road safety, including Doctor John Crozier - the chair of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons' trauma committee, who co-chaired the inquiry.
Now, a year on, he is calling for a federal approach to road safety in place of the current fragmented state-by-state approach and has backed a report undertaken by the Australian Automobile Association which outlines a number of practical measures and priorities for governments to focus on over the next two years.
If the situation is not improved upon and the current trajectory continues, 12,000 Australians will be killed and 360,000 injured at a cost of over $300 billion within the next decade.
What is the trauma committee?
The RACS trauma committee has been in place for over 35 years and plays a key role in road safety through working with authorities and agencies to prevent injury and fatalities as a result of road trauma and to improve overall safety for road users.
Two of its key achievements around road safety have been in advocating for the mandatory fitment and wearing of seat belts in the early 1970s and in pushing for roadside breath testing, after surgeons undertaking autopsies discovered the strong correlation between alcohol consumption and fatality crashes.
With road trauma taking the lives of almost 1.3 million people around the globe each year and injuring 20-50 million, in 2010 the World Health Organisation, supported by the United Nations, proposed a decade of road safety.
The proposal was to halve the number of deaths and serious injuries as a result of road trauma across the globe by 2020. Australia set a target of a 30 per cent reduction.
Dr Crozier said while the initial downward trend of deaths and serious injuries from 2011 was "pleasing" it turned a corner and from late 2015 it started to spike.
Another initiative of the committee was the formation of a National Trauma Registry. With 27 contributing centres around Australia, trauma data is collated by Melbourne's Monash University and added to the registry. This data is then used to highlight trends in trauma.
It was with this data that two worrying trends - the rising number of crash rates resulting in increased presentations to hospital with seriously and severely injured patients as well as the uptrend in deaths - that resulted in the then Federal Minister Darren Chester initiating the inquiry into the national road safety strategy in 2017.
What is impacting road trauma in Australia?
Data highlights the significant contributing factors to road trauma are a combination of speed, fatigue, alcohol consumption and distraction, however, sub-optimal infrastructure is also playing a part.
According to the AAA's study of more than 21,000 kilometres of Australia's highway network, the majority were given a three out of five star rating.
"The majority of our roads are actually three star or less in the rural and remote parts of Australia. And two thirds of our fatalities occur on those roads - often single vehicle run off road crashes," Dr Crozier said. "They are frequently male and more often than not a local person.
"The reality is people get lulled into thinking their local roads are safe and are used to driving at speeds but more often that not it is a combination of preventable components that culminate in these single vehicle run of road fatal crashes in a lot of Australia."
What can be done?
Dr Crozier said there were a number of initiatives that could be implemented to remedy the situation but several key factors were required.
Without a coordinated leadership at a national level we will continue to drift as we have.
- Dr John Crozier
While the Office for Road Safety was recently created following a 20 year gap after the Federal Office for Road Safety was disbanded in 1999, it is hoped it will operate "without fear or favour" as the previous did, by taking a longer term view and giving policy advice and oversight of the national situation.
Related coverage: Save Lives Campaign: community action aims to reduce state's road toll
Related coverage: Fatigue likely the biggest killer on our roads
Another requirement is funding. The inquiry recommended a federal injection of $3 billion into road safety but that has not yet been implemented.
From lowering the speed limit on rural roads to solutions such as building more wire road safety barriers, rumble strips and roundabouts to lowering the speed limit to 30 km/h in city centres, there are countless low cost solutions that could be rapidly uptaken to reduce overall crash fatality and serious injury rates.
It is not the case that there's going to be a single quick fix for any of this, but there are existing solutions that can be immediately implemented at the level of local government authorities, by car manufacturers, state and federal government.
- Dr John Crozier
He said more support was required for local government traffic engineers, who should be able to more easily access blackspot funding, rather than waiting for fatalities on a particularly bad stretch of road in order to make a submission.
Other ideas are to work with telcos to deactivate mobile phones once a vehicle starts moving and for the Australian design rules to mandate that every new vehicle that arrives in Australia has autonomous emergency braking systems.
"If that were done there would be a dramatic reduction in crash rates and a predictable drop in death and serious injury rate," Dr Crozier said. "With a lot of the light vehicles it would reduce rear end crashes by at least 30 per cent."
Other technology that could be more widely rolled out is point-to-point camera safety systems for all road users, but there has been a selective uptake.
"We are not achieving the overall benefit of those technologies to maximum effect," Dr Crozier said. "Rather than all jurisdictions moving harmoniously in the same direction to install them and to use them for all road users, which was the agreed start point back in 2011, there has been a selective uptake."
"It is a choice that each time we fail to implement, results in the ongoing patterns of injury and arguably the trends that we're seeing - the upward trends of crash."
The trauma committee has been involved in a range of other initiatives including education programs for surgeons in training about the emergency management of severe trauma, maintaining the National Firearms agreement and increasing safety measures around the use of quad bikes and lime scooters.
Government action
A state government spokesperson said Victoria had long been a world leader in road safety from mandatory wearing of seatbelts, a zero tolerance approach to drink driving and being an early adopter of the Towards Zero strategy to aim for a future with no fatalities of serious injuries on roads.
It said the government was continuing to focus on projects to address crash risks and patterns found through analysis and research, overseen by the Department of Transport, such as a fatigue trial, high-profile TAC driver distraction campaign, training the more than 130 road surveillance officers around Victoria about motorcycle hazard perception to ensure road inspections assess road imperfections from a motorcyclist's perspective and investing in projects to tackle pedestrian and cyclist safety.
Road projects around the Ballarat region include upgrades on the Midland Highway between Ballarat and Creswick, including flexible safety barriers along the left hand side at high risk locations, installing 230km of barriers along the Western Freeway and will soon upgrade the Midland Highway between Buninyong and Clarendon with barriers, rumble strips, and overtaking opportunities.
The Federal Government was contacted but declined to comment.
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