For all the vehicles involved australia contact data in crashes we know the type, the age, information about the driver and a bit of information about what happened to the vehicle. For each casualty we know their age band and their gender.
In the previous section, we noted that we are more confident that the numbers of fatal and serious crashes are more complete, and therefore it seems a good place to start to look at just the serious and fatal crashes. Below we can see that about 1.7 million of the 8.5 million crashes fall into these categories.
Overview crash types
An obvious starting point is to start by seeing if the total number of crashes is coming down over time since we have 40 years’ worth of data here.
The main trend here is the historical fall from a high of 6,000 to around 3,000 in the mid 1990’s. A further sustained fall in the late 2000’s has seen the number stabilise between 1,600 and 1,700 for the last decade.
The number of recorded crashes of this severity have fallen dramatically from over 65,000 to around 20,000 per year in the mid 2010’s, before rising again into the mid 20,000s over the last 4 years of the data.