In 2025, 1,314 Australians were killed on our roads. On average, that is over three people per day and a 1.7 percent increase from 2024. A lot of these road traumas were caused by what is known as the Fatal Five: speeding, alcohol and illicit drug use, not wearing a seatbelt, fatigue and distraction.

The Australian Government launched the National Road safety strategy in 2021 to tackle the increasing number of road deaths. It aimed to halve road deaths and reduce significant injuries by 30 percent by 2030. To do this, it adopted an approach, which recognises human fallibility, vehicle safety and a shared responsibility on the road. This strategy, which works towards eliminating all road deaths by 2050, has been dubbed as “Vision Zero” worldwide.

Is Australia on track to meet the target by 2030? According to the CEO of the Australasian College of Road Safety Dr Ingrid Johnston, we are not moving in the right direction.

“The honest answer is that the current trajectory is not good enough,” she tells upstart.

“Meeting the strategy would require a faster shift from awareness campaigns and fragmented interventions towards systemic measures that are known to work: safer speeds, safer roads, safer vehicles and sustained enforcement.”

Dr Johnston also says that The National Road Safety Annual Progress Report from 2024 has not been released, despite it being a requirement of the strategy. This leaves Australia “without a clear national implementation framework”.

Besides the Fatal Five, there are other hidden dangers that Aussies should be aware of when hopping into the driver’s seat.

One is maintaining appropriate distance, with a lot of cars braking when they are too close together, removing buffer space to avoid collision. Senior Program Manager of the Monash University Accident Research Centre, Jerome Carslake, acknowledges this as a hidden cause of road accidents.

“If you go out there and you look around, it’s very normalised for people to sit less than three seconds behind the other person,” he tells upstart.

“These people sit right up close to each other, which then means if something goes wrong in front, there’s no chance to wash out.”

Another factor that contributes to issues on the road is emotional responses. While our vehicles get us from A to B, they are also another space for our thoughts and emotions from the day to ruminate. A lot of what we think about during the day comes with us into the vehicle and can snowball into something worse from a minor inconvenience on the road.

“If you’re by yourself, what might have been a molehill becomes a mountain, especially as you get tired and fatigued,” Carslake says. “There might be the pressures of driving and other sort of chances that you ruminate on it.”

“As you get increasingly tired, your brain quite often goes down a negative pathway. Then that flows into how you’re driving as well, which can make you far more aggressive and distracted at the same time.”

Norway is the world’s leading example for road safety, according to the European Transport Safety Council. The northern European nation was awarded the prestigious Road Safety Performance Index award in 2025. Norway’s population sits at 5.66 million people compared to our 27.2 million, but has been successfully working towards Vision Zero since 2001. The number of road-related deaths decreased from 275 in 2001 to 49 in 2025.

When comparing our road safety record to Norway’s, there are some important things to bear in mind. Australia is vast with a larger number of rural communities, where the road safety standards are lower and less regulated. Norway has a very low population density and is among the world’s wealthiest nations with a $1.9 trillion sovereign wealth fund. As a result, they can enforce a thorough five-step program to obtain a driver’s licence that costs $4000-$7000 Australian dollars.

Despite the difference between the two nations, Dr Johnston says there are some components from Norway’s strategy that Australia could implement. The blood alcohol limit for drivers in Norway is 0.02 percent and the maximum speed limit on the most common roads is 80 kilometres per hour. Others include lower speeds on high-risk regional roads and busy areas, more median separation and roadside protection, and removing older cars that don’t have adequate safety features.

Norway has adopted Safe System thinking, and Dr Johnston believes Australia can too.

“Australia already knows a great deal about what works,” she says. “The challenge is less about discovering a hidden silver bullet and more about implementing proven measures at sufficient scale, consistency and urgency to reduce road trauma.”

On the other hand, Carslake suggests that there’s a disparity between Norway and Australia’s culture on the roads. He says that Australia has a compliance system that relies heavily on rule enforcement, which results in a “backwards” culture on our roads. A Statistics Norway survey found that Norway is very socially connected, which fosters a collective-minded culture on their roads.

“A lot of people there, they understand the why,” he says. “You go into those countries, it’s very much about us. Whereas in Australia, it’s all about me. Me getting from A to B is far more important.”

Article: Ariana Cosatovic is a third-year Bachelor of Media and Communications student (Journalism) at La Trobe University. You can follow her on X at @arianacosatovic

Photo: Black Spur, Yarra Ranges NP, Vic, Australia by Diliff is available HERE and is used under a Creative Commons Licence. This image has not been modified.