Driving towards safer roads

Friday, 10 May 2024

In 2023, South Australia had the highest number of lives lost in a single calendar year since 2011 – 117 lives. These tragedies reinforce the important work the Department for Infrastructure and Transport does to improve safety on our roads.

We are on our way to delivering on our road safety commitments against South Australia’s Road Safety Action Plan 2023–2025 and released the first annual report this week.

The Road Safety Action Plan Annual Report 2023 presents a 12-month snapshot of achievements and progress against the action plan’s priority areas. This includes schools and local places, road users and road user behaviour and regional areas. The actions are being delivered by the Department for Infrastructure and Transport, as well as other agencies such as South Australia Police, Fleet SA and SafeWork SA.

Over the past year, the THINK! Road Safety Partnerships Program was at the forefront of driving road safety education across South Australia. The Department implemented 21 partnership agreements that saw more than 28,000 students, 1,000 regional football players and 500 people from local community groups and organisations access a road safety-related educational program.

Another achievement was the expansion of the On The Right Track Program to support learner driver’s in Ceduna, Yalata, Coober Pedy, Oodnadatta, Marree, Leigh Creek, Copley, and Nepabunna.  Since the program began, the service has:

• assisted more than 3,000 customers
• issued 1,664 learner permits
• issued almost 388 provisional licences.

The annual report also includes examples of progress made in 2023 in legislation, infrastructure, campaigns and enforcement to improve road safety. It includes a comprehensive overview of crash data for 2023 and the first report of the Safety Performance Indicators, which were established to track progress against the road safety targets.

Read the Road Safety Annual Report 2023.