ACM state correspondent Ben Silvester explains the latest data around Victoria's roads.
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00:00Hi, I'm ACM Victorian correspondent Ben Sylvester.
00:05So regional Victoria has just 25% of the state's population, but it has 55% of the road fatalities
00:12each year.
00:13So I dug into the TAC data from over the past decade to try to see some of the differences
00:19between the city and country statistics and whether they might have any clues as to why
00:25regional Victoria was so overrepresented.
00:27One of the big things that jumped out from the data was the difference in the number
00:34of single vehicle crashes and head-on crashes in country areas.
00:40The head-on crashes were almost double the rate in regional Victoria compared to Melbourne,
00:46and single vehicle crashes were even higher, making up half of all fatalities on regional
00:53roads, where it was just a quarter in Melbourne.
00:57Another big difference was the speed zones where deaths happened.
01:00So in Melbourne, the most risky zone was the 60km zones, where about a third of deadly
01:08crashes happened.
01:09Of course, Melbourne only has 100km zones in wide, smooth freeways, whereas in regional
01:15Victoria you have 100km roads, which are just two lane roads, can be windy, can have potholes.
01:24It's much more dangerous, and this was reflected in the data where nearly 70% of the deadly
01:32crashes on regional roads happened on 100km roads.
01:37So it really showed that speed is probably the main factor that led to regional roads
01:45being so much more deadly than Melbourne.
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