Image: AAA.
Australians in sparsely populated rural and regional areas are about five times more likely to die in road crashes than those in urban areas, according to the peak body for Australia’s state-based motoring clubs.
The Australian Automobile Association (AAA) has found this alarming discrepancy by in data from the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics, but the AAA says there is needs to be more precise data for the problem to be better understood.
It found the per capita road death rate for regional NSW in 2022 was 9.7 deaths per 100,000 people, while the corresponding rate for Sydney was 1.67 deaths per 100,000 people.
All told, 1193 people died on the nation’s roads in 2022, an increase of more than 5 per cent on the previous year despite the ever-safer car fleet. This equates to a national per capita fatality rate of 4.59 deaths per 100,000 people…