When the latest iteration of the National Road Safety Strategy was launched in 2021 it set the ambitious target of achieving zero deaths on Australian roads by 2050.
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Although highly aspirational this seemed achievable given, despite strong population growth, road deaths had fallen by 22.5 per cent between 2010 and 2020.
Even though this fell short of the strategy's target of a 30 per cent reduction for the decade, it was a solid result and in line with a steady reduction in road trauma over the previous 40 years.
The 2021-30 strategy called for a 50 per cent reduction in fatalities and a 30 per cent reduction in injuries for the decade ending in 2030. These targets, while also ambitious, didn't seem ridiculous.
But what a difference three years makes. Road deaths did not fall below pre-COVID levels in either 2021 or 2022 and this year has been the worst for fatalities since 2017.
By the end of November, 1253 people had died; an increase of 6.3 per cent on the previous year. At least 14 more people have died since then and the year has a few days yet to run.
December, too, has been a difficult one for our region. In the space of a couple of days we had a man die in a two-car crash on Moulder Street, Orange while in Cowra the elderly passenger of a mini-bus was killed in a horror crash at night.
We are seeing the biggest year-on-year jump in road deaths in more than a decade, a development that casts serious doubts on the achievability of the strategy's 2030 and 2050 targets.
It also calls into question the assumptions on which they were based.
It would appear that either the "safe roads, safe vehicles and safe road use" strategy just doesn't go far enough or that there are other variables in play.
Putting 2020, the COVID year when road deaths dropped below 1200 per annum for the first time since 1945, to one side, road deaths have been rising incrementally since 2018.
The self-congratulation by the federal, state and territory infrastructure ministers in the foreword to the 2021-30 strategy was premised on the figures for the decade overall.
With the benefit of hindsight more attention should have been paid to the sharp spike in road deaths between 2018 and 2019. In 2018, 1135 people were killed. This jumped by 59 fatalities or 5.2 per cent to 1194 in 2019; the largest year-on-year increase for that decade. While much of the reporting around this year's toll has been along the lines that 2023 is an outlier and an aberration that is not necessarily the case. There had been a similar spike pre-COVID.
Clues as to what is happening are to be found in the raw data, particularly when urban road deaths are charted against deaths on rural and remote roads.
If governments want to reduce the road toll they should build better roads.
In 2019 there were just 2.2 road deaths and 142.8 serious injuries per 100,000 people in major cities. There were 10 deaths and 171.1 serious injuries per 100,000 people on regional roads. But, even worse, there were 25.1 road deaths and 244 serious injuries per 100,000 people in remote areas.
Indigenous people living in remote communities are disproportionately affected by road trauma with a fatality rate more than 10 times that of a city dweller.
While there may be some merit in speculating on possible changes in driver attitudes since COVID, or suggestions that random breath testing has been wound back in some jurisdictions, these statistics tell a terrible story.
Regional roads, many of which were badly damaged by flooding for much 2023, and roads in remote Australia fall well short of the standards expected in the cities.
There is an obvious relationship between road maintenance - or the lack thereof - and road deaths. If governments are serious about addressing the road toll, building better infrastructure would be a good place to start.
