Priorities for crash countermeasures in Australia and New Zealand – an overview based on safe systems principles

This work was part of a project to provide information on key fatal and serious crash types across Australia and New Zealand, and to benchmark safety performance of different road stereotypes between jurisdictions. The entire dataset of casualty crashes occurring in Australia and New Zealand from 2001 to 2010 was assembled. So far as possible, differences between the different data sets were reconciled to create a single database for Australia and another for New Zealand. Where this was not possible, those jurisdictions which could not be reconciled with the overall classification were omitted from that part of the analysis. In line with Safe System principles, results were presented as fatal and serious injury crashes contrasted with all casualty crashes, generating some important insights for crash countermeasure priorities. Some types of crash had large proportions of fatal and serious injury crashes, while other types of crash had relatively small percentages of these crashes but such high overall frequencies that they accounted for a large proportion of the fatal and serious injury crashes. Key crash types for Australia were off-path, head-on, adjacent approaches, and same direction crashes, and for New Zealand the key crash types were loss-of-control on curve, crossing/turning, loss-of-control on a straight, and rear-end/ obstruction. In Australia, the largest number of fatal and serious injury crashes occurred on urban arterial roads; while in New Zealand, the greatest number occurred on rural roads. Plans for further analyses in terms of crash rates for benchmarking will be described in the paper.