Australia is in the middle of a serious crisis on its roads as the death toll from crashes surges across the country.

Fatalities have jumped in five states and territories in the past year.

In total, the nation’s death toll in the year to July 31 is up 10.2 per cent – to 1327, or the highest figure since October 2012.

The figures include a staggering 174 per cent spike in the Northern Territory, where 63 people died in the period compared to 23 in the same period a year earlier.

There has been a hefty 17.1 per cent jump in NSW, while Victoria’s road toll is up 9.3 per cent.

South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT were the only jurisdictions where the road toll fell.

Alexander Paz, chair of transport and main roads at Queensland University of Technology, said the issue was a complex with many factors.

“Crashes involve many things, for example, mental health, intoxication, drugs, alcohol and just stress in general,” he said.

“Everything is interconnected. It is not a single factor typically.”

He said there were often not enough resources, competing objectives and a lack of collaboration between agencies.

“Road safety engineers are looking at the infrastructure. They are aware that there are issues such as cell [mobile] phones and there is legislation put in place to deal with that,” he said.

“I never hear them talk about mental health. They talk about intoxication and fatigue, but in my opinion mental health is a major problem.”

Increases

Australia has not experienced a decline in year-on-year road deaths since 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic reduced the number of people driving.

In fact, we’re going backwards. Australian Automobile Association managing director Michael Bradley said the decade-long National Road Safety Strategy that aimed to halve road deaths by 2030 was nowhere near meeting its objectives,

Since the strategy was implemented in 2021, road deaths had increased 17.4 per cent, Bradley said.

“We are losing 110 lives each month and heading in the wrong direction at alarming speed,” he said.

“These latest figures are not some kind of one-off, they represent an unacceptable trend.”

Milad Haghani, senior lecturer of urban mobility, public safety and disaster risk at UNSW Sydney, said remote and regional roads posed a significantly higher risk of death.

“This could be due to a number of factors: Speeding, risk-taking behaviours and others such as poorer infrastructure, lower levels of enforcement, collisions with wildlife, long trips and driver fatigue,” he said in The Conversation.

“For the foreseeable future, human drivers will continue to be the primary operators of vehicles, and human factors remain the biggest contributor to road trauma.”

The increase year on year has led to calls for increased transparency about data and road conditions from the Australian Automobile Association.

Paz said anything that could be done to increase understanding of why crashes occurred was a good idea.

“Crash data is collected by the police and then it takes time to go from the police to the transport agencies and then again for them to do their corresponding analysis,” he said.

“There is no single repository of all the integrated information.”

Autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers, but cannot be relied upon to solve the death toll. Photo: Getty

Technological solution?

Experts like Paz and Haghani highlighted that even though vehicle safety was constantly improving, coinciding with a drop in vehicle deaths, that trend had reversed.

Paz said that although some people hoped that autonomous vehicles and technology might increase safety, “they aren’t going to be here any time soon”.

“We should be aware of that and continue to work on the problem from multiple directions,” he said.

“Humans will always make mistakes. The human factor will always be there, so we should be designing and building the infrastructure to be as forgiving as possible.”

Although cars are becoming safer for drivers and passengers, the advent of smartphones is a source of increased risk, with 18 per cent of Australians admitting in a recent Finder survey to using one.