ORANGE and Bathurst residents are reeling from another accident on a road which has a history of fatal accidents that grows at an unacceptable and alarming rate.
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On Wednesday afternoon, a 20-year-old Bathurst woman was killed when her Holden Astra collided with a Toyota HiLux about 20 kiilometres east of Orange on the Mitchell Highway.
The driver of the Toyota, a 32-year-old man from Orange, was treated at the scene by paramedics before being taken to Orange hospital, where he remains in a stable condition, while his passenger, a 63-year-old man also from Orange, was airlifted to Liverpool Hospital in a serious condition.
The horrible accident was the second fatality on the notorious 50-kilometre stretch of road linking the two cities in as many months. Those incidents are far from isolated: they are just the latest in a tragic road toll that grows with each passing year.
The reasons for Wednesday’s accident are unknown at this point – and the Central Western Daily will not speculate here as to what caused the tragedy – but it’s a fair time to ask some serious questions about the Mitchell Highway’s future.
Most pointedly: why do these accidents keep occurring, and what should be done to put an end to them?
More than a decade ago researchers at Monash University’s accident research centre in Melbourne produced a report, Cost-effective Infrastructure Measures on Rural Roads.
Researchers considered literature from Australia and around the world to address the issue of why crashes, fatalities and injuries on Australian regional and rural roads are disproportionately higher than metropolitan areas.
The Monash researchers concluded that road features play a vital role in determining not only the risk of crashing but, more importantly, the severity of injuries sustained by victims in a crash.
Key contributing elements to the increased severity of rural crashes are “higher operating speeds, hazardous roadsides and generally poorer road geometry, because many roads now no longer perform the function for which they were constructed”.
These findings are worth transposing over the examination of the Mitchell Highway’s dreadful record for fatal accidents.
Is there a reason why so many crashes on the road result in a lost life? The time has well and truly come to find out.
