Australians in sparsely populated rural and regional areas are about five times more likely to die in road crashes than those in urban areas, according to the peak body for Australia’s state-based motoring clubs. 

The Australian Automobile Association (AAA) has found this alarming discrepancy by in data from the Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics, but the AAA says there is needs to be more precise data for the problem to be better understood. 

It found the per capita road death rate for regional NSW in 2022 was 9.7 deaths per 100,000 people, while the corresponding rate for Sydney was 1.67 deaths per 100,000 people. 

All told, 1193 people died on the nation’s roads in 2022, an increase of more than 5 per cent on the previous year despite the ever-safer car fleet. This equates to a national per capita fatality rate of 4.59 deaths per 100,000 people. 



AAA managing director Michael Bradley said the numbers “present a picture that should be of great concern for people and families living across regional Australia". 

“We know deaths are continuing to rise, but we have no national data regarding serious injuries, road quality, crash causes, or details regarding the people and cars involved" he said. 

“It is not enough to know how many people were killed in road crashes – we also need to know how they were killed, and how to prevent these deaths in the future”. 

Image: NRMA. 

The NRMA has said that crashes on regional roads are more likely to be deadly because regional roads have a higher speed limit.  

The National Road Safety Strategy says that more road crashes occur in regional and remote areas because "A number of roads in regional and remote areas are undivided, single carriageways with poorer surface conditions and design, and increased road side hazards (legacy road standard)". 

It says that while fatigue and longer driving distances contribute "The types of crashes and the speed at which they occur are particularly dangerous. 73 per cent of fatalities in regional areas were the result of lane departure (run-off-road and head-on) crashes." 

Head on fatalities are the next most common contributor to regional and remote road deaths. 

AAA's Michael Bradley says their to be more detailed data and AAA’s 2023-24 federal budget submission calls for Commonwealth road funding to states and territories to be linked to their provision of this road crash data, “so Australians can be satisfied that road spending is going where it is needed” it says. 

“There is so much we don’t know about road trauma in Australia, but one thing we do know is that if we keep making the same mistakes, we will continue to produce the same tragic outcomes,” Bradley said.