South Australia’s Strategic Plan 2007 includes, within the overall objective of improving wellbeing, two road safety targets. Target 2.9 Road Safety — fatalities by 2010 reduce road fatalities to less than 90 persons per year. Target 2.10 Road Safety — serious injuries by 2010 reduce serious injuries to less than 1,000 per year. These targets represent challenging and achievable intermediate steps towards still further safety improvement in future years. Ultimately, no death or serious injury on our roads is acceptable. The targets are relevant to and connected with a number of other wellbeing and sustainability targets in the Strategic Plan, including healthy weight, greater safety at work, and greenhouse gas emission reductions. The targets are also consistent with the target in the National Road Safety Strategy 2001-2010 which aims to reduce Australia’s rate of road fatalities to no more than 5.6 per 100,000 people in 2010. South Australians are safer on the road than ever before, with a record low number of fatalities in 2006, and a downward trend in serious injury. An outline of this improvement, and how it has occurred can be found in the Appendix overview of South Australian crashes. This strategy has been prepared to help take that improvement a further step forward for the people of the South East. An aspirational goal has been set. Achieve a fatality free year in the South East by the end of 2010. A more specific road safety target for the South East has also been developed to provide the community with a goal, and to act as a unifying point for the various individuals and organisations working to reduce road trauma in the region. Reduce the number of serious casualties (fatalities and serious injuries) in the South East to less than 76 by the end of 2010. For a regional area such as the South East, the annual number of fatalities is relatively small and highly variable largely because of the random pattern of crash occurrence. For example, since 1990 the number of fatalities has ranged between a low of 4 fatalities in 1991, a high of 20 in 2005, 6 in 2006 and considerable variation between the other years. To reduce this random variation in annual numbers the sum of annual fatalities and serious injuries — referred to as serious casualties — is used as the performance indicator for the South East. (Author/publisher)
Abstract