Lives Saved by Accelerating the Implementation of Vehicle Safety Technology in New South Wales

Australian vehicle standards are governed nationwide by the Australian Design Rules (ADR) that specify regulatory standards for the safety performance of road vehicles. The aim of this study was to quantify the number of lives saved on New South Wales roads by accelerating the update of safer vehicles by aligning ADR with global best practice represented by the new European Union General Safety Regulation. The methods used in this study to estimate the impact of future road safety interventions was a logical reduction of current crashes into future casualty outcomes, the residual, based on what is known about delivery of future safety measures and system improvements. A database was prepared including information on all 2018 fatalities on NSW roads (n=347). The database contained information for each individual crash, the vehicles and persons involved and the road environment where the crash occurred. In the results of this study, it was found that a scenario of aligning Australian Design Rules with the EU General Safety Regulation on a number of key vehicle safety technologies could potentially save around 20 lives annually in 2030 and around 90 lives cumulatively, over and beyond the baseline trend, between 2023 and 2030 in New South Wales. It could be concluded that vehicle safety has significant lives saving potential, however, the time lag of benefit realisation will require continued investments in other areas like infrastructure safety, speed management and enforcement in the coming decades to achieve future trauma reduction targets in NSW.