Trends in road deaths

Updated May 2025, with fatalities to March 2023, population to September 2024, vehicle kilometres to 2023-24.

Data sources:

In the last year or so there has been an uptick in road deaths in NSW, Vic, and the NT.

It’s hard to compare total deaths between states with very different populations, so here are road deaths per capita, for rolling four-quarter periods:

There is naturally more noise in this data for the smaller states and territories as the discrete number of deaths in these geographies is small (especially ACT, Tas, and NT). The sparsely populated Northern Territory has a death rate more than double the rest of Australia, while the almost entirely urban ACT has the lowest death rate.

Another way of looking at the data is deaths per vehicle kilometre (only possible for financial years):

This chart is very similar – as vehicle kilometres per capita haven’t shifted dramatically.

Note: I’ve not distinguished between drivers and and passengers for both vehicles and motorcycles.

Vehicle occupant fatalities were trending down until around 2020, but appear to be rising slowly again. Motorcyclist fatalities have been relatively flat for a long time but have been trending upwards since 2021.

Pedestrian fatalities were trending down until around 2014 but now seem to be trending up.

Cyclist fatalities dropped in the early 1990s (around the same time as the introduction of mandatory helmet laws) and have have been relatively flat since then (apart from a small peak in 2014).

It’s possible to distinguish between motorcycles and other vehicles for both deaths and vehicle kilometres travelled, and the following chart shows the ratio of these across time. Note that I’ve had to use a log scale so you can see the trend details for other vehicles.

The death rate for motorcycle riders/passengers per motorcycle vehicle kilometre was 41 times higher than other motorised vehicle types in 2023-24. The death rate for motorcycles was trending down from 1991 to around 2015 but now appears to be trending up.

The better news is that the death rate for other vehicles has dropped from 9.8 in 1989-90 to 2.9 in 2023-24, although it has been relatively flat since around 2017, and of course we’d all aspire for these figures to be zero.

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