The 2024 WA Australian Road Fatalities and Serious Injuries report has been released giving insight into challenges to road safety in WA.
Road Safety Commission annual fatality and serious injury report released
- In 2024, 1600 people were killed and seriously injured in 1381 crashes on Western Australian Roads.
- 188 fatalities from 171 crashes; 1412 people seriously injured from 1210 crashes.
- Regional areas had 61 per cent of all fatalities, a 9 per cent increase from 2023.
The 2024 WA Australian Road Fatalities and Serious Injuries report has been released giving insight into challenges to road safety in WA.
The annual publication reports on people who have been killed or seriously injured (KSI) in a reported crash on WA roads or road-related areas that are open to the public. The report collects a range of data including age, gender, geographical and other contributing factors to track trends that impact the road toll over time.
The report shows that there was in 2024, 188 people died on Western Australian Roads, 114 in regional areas and 74 in the Perth metropolitan area.
While there was an increase in the number of fatalities from 2023 to 2024, the number of people seriously injured decreased, resulting in a drop in the overall KSI figure.
Per 100,000 population, the number of people killed and seriously injured in 2024 decreased by 14 per cent compared with the five-year average.
Despite these reductions, this downward trend is not moving fast enough to meet the State Government's Driving Change Road Safety Strategy 2020-2030, which aims to reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured by 50 to 70 per cent by 2030.
"While the state's population increases by two to three per cent annually, the number of those killed and seriously injured is coming down every year," Road Safety Commissioner Adrian Warner said.
"But despite this figure, the reality is we aren't meeting our Driving Change Road Safety Strategy targets to reduce the number of people fatally or seriously injured in road crashes by 50 to 70 per cent by 2030.
"That's disappointing, but we will continue to work together with Main Roads WA and WA Police to implement new programs and research new ways to accelerate our targets."
Speed remains the primary contributing factor to road crashes.
In 2024, almost half of all fatalities occurred on roads with a speed limit of 100km/h or more, most of these in regional areas.
"We need road users to dramatically change how they think about speed," Warner said.
"I often wonder why it is that we can accept science in so much of our lives but struggle to accept the science of speed. In a simple contest between physics and physiology, physics always wins."
He said speed limits were created to be followed under ideal conditions - but fatigue, distractions and hazards like weather and road conditions increased the risk of crashing at speed.
The report showed that regional areas had 61 per cent of all fatalities, a 9 per cent increase from 2023.
To help tackle this, more than $32.5 million for road safety initiatives were announced after the Premier's Road Safety Roundtable in September.
This included $20 million for safety treatments on key local government roads, $8.6 million for two new breath and drug testing buses in regional areas, $2.1 million for increased police traffic enforcement in regional areas plus high-visibility police car livery and $1.8 million for improved traffic data gathering.
There are also reviews of motorcycle, heavy vehicle, and learner and provisional driver training currently underway.
"We are taking positive steps - the massive investment in regional road safety over recent years will deliver a significant safety dividend over the long term - but we can't simply engineer our way to zero," Warner said.
"A major challenge that we are grappling with is how to relate the population level outcomes of 188 deaths and 1412 serious injuries to the individual experiences of more than two million licensed drivers. And this boils down to road user behaviour - our perception of risk, and the choices we make while on the road.
"It's about our attitudes, our expectations, our sense of - or lack of sense of - obligation to ourselves and to other people on the road. In other words, our road safety culture.
"There is no simple solution, it's a multi-pronged approach and I want everyone in the community to realise they are part of the solution."
A full copy of the report can be found here (pdf) .
