TThe safety of road infrastructure depends on many factors including the width of the road, whether there are curves and crests, line marking, the presence and type of any intersections, roadside hazards, overtaking provision and whether head-on collisions are avoided through the use of medians and safety barriers, rather than relying on a splash of white paint. The safety features of a road are not always obvious to motorists but they do make a huge difference.
In total more than 20,000 km of highways have been analysed, which represents three per cent of the total road network in Australia. These carry over 15 per cent of the nation’s road traffic and experienced 1,170 road crash deaths, or 15 per cent of all road deaths in Australia during the period 2005-2009.
Performance Tracking uses the data compiled for each risk map to assess how the risk on the network, as a whole, and on individual road sections, had changed over time. It is a way of measuring success and the effectiveness of investment in safer roads. This report looks at how risk on the Australian Network has changed from 2000-2004 to 2005-2009, as well as identifying the ‘most improved’ and ‘persistently higher risk’ roads.
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