The deaths of five Picton High School students aged 14 to 16 in a car crash south-west of Sydney on Tuesday night were unimaginably tragic, yet crashes like these often have predictable and preventable causes, say NSW’s top road safety experts.
The passengers died in Buxton when a Nissan Navara utility driven by an 18-year-old male P-plater, the only survivor, crashed into a tree.
A family places a framed photo at the base of a tree where five young people were killed in a crash on Tuesday night on East Parade in Buxton, NSW.Credit:Kate Geraghty
Young drivers continue to be over-represented in fatal car crashes in NSW, injury prevention expert Professor Rebecca Ivers said.
Since the Graduated Licensing Scheme was introduced in June 2000, young driver deaths have fallen by about half, according to the NSW Centre for Road Safety. While the overall death rate for young and inexperienced drivers and passengers had improved, Ivers said their over-representation persisted.
“It just doesn’t shift,” said Ivers, the head of the School of Population Health at the University of NSW.
“This is one of those crashes that will devastate a community for life, the cost is unimaginable, to families, to the community, to the schools.
“It is a cocktail of risk factors, absolutely deadly, yet completely predictable.”
According to the NSW Centre for Road Safety, about 6 per cent of all active licences are provisional. Of the drivers involved in fatal crashes between 2017 and 2021, 10 per cent held a provisional licence. Of those P-platers, 74 per cent were men, 26 per cent were women.
Ivers said known risk factors included the age and gender of the driver, the number of passengers, the poorer quality of roads outside major metropolitan centres, the potential speed of the vehicle, lack of speed cameras, and the fact the vehicle had fewer seatbelts than occupants.
After a slight fall during COVID, Ivers said road deaths were “going through the roof again”. Before Tuesday night’s fatal crash, 201 people had died on the roads in NSW this year, 18 more than the same time last year.
“It is almost like everyone has forgotten about road safety with all the focus on COVID. Don’t let the focus on infectious diseases let us lose gains we have made [with road safety].”
Ivers said she did not believe the crash warranted a change in the rules governing young drivers, but an increase in awareness and education programs for parents, teenagers and schools about the risks to young drivers. “I think we have dropped the ball a bit.”
These risks included:
Gender: Men account for about 76 per cent of fatalities. “Young men are at a much greater risk,” Ivers said. “We don’t pay enough attention to this. It is a real male problem.”
Age: Those aged 17 to 25 make up 13 per cent of licence holders yet were involved in 18 per cent of fatalities in the years 2017-2021.
Professor Ann Williamson, the president of the Australasian College of Road Safety said research suggested brains do not mature enough for drivers to assess risk until the age of 24. “Some develop earlier, but it is very hard to say who they are.”
Speed: Police said speed was a possible factor in the crash. Professor Raphael Grzebieta, an adjunct professor at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, said drivers aged under 25 lacked the perception and experience to accurately judge risk. “If you are driving at 80 km/h and you hit a tree, it is equivalent to driving off the roof of a six-storey building and hoping you will survive. They won’t.” Driving too fast contributes to about 41 per cent of road fatalities and 24 per cent of serious injuries in NSW.
Passenger numbers: There were five passengers in the vehicle when it crashed. International research shows the risk of crashing increases with every additional passenger because young people in cars egg each other on, Grzebieta said.
Compared to driving alone, a young driver is at two to three times greater risk of being involved in a fatal crash when carrying two or more passengers, Ivers said. Yet a young male driver with a female passenger has about the same risk as driving alone, the research shows.
Young drivers rarely crash when they are on their Ls or when accompanied by an adult on their Ps, Grzebieta said.
Williamson said eliminating all crashes among young people was impossible. Programs to teach young drivers about risk had not been very successful. And younger passengers, such as the five 14- to 16-year-olds who died, were even less likely to make a good judgment about the risk of getting in a car with an inexperienced driver.
“We adults, parents, the people who have got more experience, we have to put the safeguards on.”
Wearing seat belts: Police said the vehicle that crashed only had four seat belts, yet six people were inside. Unrestrained drivers and passengers are eight times more likely to be killed in a road crash, say experts.
According to NSW’s Centre for Road Safety, wearing a properly adjusted seat belt reduces the risk of death or serious injury by up to 50 per cent. It is compulsory to wear seatbelts in NSW. Despite that, every year about 30 drivers and passengers who were not wearing available seatbelts are killed.
Before rushing to conclusions about the crash, Williamson urged the public to consider the age and experience of the driver.
“I just feel so terrible for the young man who was the driver. How can you recover from it?” Williamson said. “We should be careful how we respond to it.”
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