New star rating system revealed for major Australia roads
Motorists around the country can now assess the safety characteristics of Australia’s major highways and arterial roads, but safety officials argue there is more that can be done.
The safety characteristics and crash history of some of Australia’s major highways and arterial roads are now available for Aussie motorists to view under a new rollout from government association Austroads.
Launched this week, the Australian Road Assessment Program (AusRAP)’s new online national dashboard rates major highways and arterial roads on a five-star scale, where one star is the least safe and five stars is deemed the safest. You can access the dashboard here.
The online tool covers some of Australia’s busiest roads, using a combination of physical road characteristics (including width and curvature), roadside hazards, traffic flow, safety features and speed. Road data from Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory now join NSW, which released data in July, in the initial phase, including traffic estimates and records of road fatalities and serious injuries.
However, the national dashboard still misses out on the road networks in Queensland, South Australia and Tasmania altogether, while details such as road accidents involving pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists are not part of the initial phase.
According to Austroad officials, the dashboard is the result of a three-year collection of road data, ranking and analysis, and comes at a critical time as government officials grapple with a rising road toll. It is hoped the online tool will shine a light on which roads pose the highest risks of death and serious injury, thereby informing respective governments which road upgrades would have the greatest life-saving impact.
"We know not all roads are equal when it comes to risk,” said Austroads chief executive, Geoff Allan.
“That’s why the focus of AusRAP is on the country’s most travelled roads – the highways and major arterial routes where millions of Australians drive every day, and where fatal and serious injury crashes are most likely to occur.
“By publishing star ratings and crash history data on a single, national dashboard, we’re giving governments and the community a clear line of sight to where upgrades will have the greatest impact.”
While this phase of the online dashboard has focussed on major roads, Austroads has hinted that future phases “will expand coverage as new assessments and data become available”. Data from South Australia is expected to be added soon, followed by information from Queensland and Tasmania.
“Importantly, these results provide a snapshot in time of the safety of our roads – and there is still much work to be done to reach our goal of having 80 per cent of all travel occur on roads rated 3 stars or better by 2030,” added Geoff Allan.
The national dashboard comes following a devastating period in road trauma nationally, including a worrying trend in increased vulnerable road user deaths.
