Year Crash by Year and Crash Type

33 selected 3k
Multiple

Single

State 2k

Crash
8 selected

Vehicle Crashes Age Group

1k

in Australia

19 9
19 0
19 1
19 2
19 3
19 4
19 5
19 6
19 7
19 8
20 9
20 0
20 1
20 2
20 3
20 4
20 5
20 6
20 7
20 8
20 9
20 0
20 1
20 2
20 3
20 4
20 5
20 6
20 7
20 8
20 9
20 0
21
8
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
9
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
0
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
19
6 selected Year

Who is Involved When Crashes Where Crashes Happen

in Crashes Happen
Crash by Road User and Gender Crash by Time of day Crash by State
Driver Male
Passe...
Female ACT Tas NT SA WA Qld Vic NSW
Pedes...
Road User

Unspe... 475 1,550 1,636 4,545 6,271 10,491 11,546 16,239

Moto... Night (43.0%)
Pedal... State
Day (57.0%)
Moto...
Other... Crash by National Remoteness Areas
Crash

Crash by Age Group Crash by Dayweek Inner Regional Austr... Major Cities of Austr... Outer Regional Austr... Remote Australia Very Remote Australia
2,211 2,364 1,650 304 339
Crash
10,004 National Remoteness Areas
75_or_older (9.7%) 0_to_16 (7.7%)
Monday Tuesday Wedne... Thursd... 9,432
65_to_74 (7.6%)
6,097 6,136 6,647 7,095 8,860 Crash by Speed Limit groups
17_to_25 (26.1%) 8,288
7,716
40_to_64 (25.4%) 7,144
Sunday Friday Saturd... <40 km/hr >120 km/hr Others 40-59 km/hr 80-99 km/hr 60-79 km/hr 100-119 km/hr
8,449 8,649 9,680 6,572 70 116 1,381 3,246 7,250 16,451 24,239
26_to_39 (23.4%) 6,000
Speed Limit groups
Dayweek
Lindsey Falconer

Analysis of Australian Crash Data from 1989 to 2021

The purpose of the dataset dashboard is to examine when crashes occur, where they occur and who is
involved in the crash. The Australian Government’s Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional
Development and Communications has compiled a dataset tracking vehicle crashes from 1989 through
2021. The dataset looks at the demographics of the vehicles and individuals involved in road accidents,
and other characteristics of the crashes, such as when and when they occurred. For some of the
columns, the data was incomplete, therefore the analysis focused on the fields with the most complete
dataset.

The dashboard uses a stacked area chart to give an overview of the number and type of crashes broken
out by year. In the 32 years, there were 52,843 in Australia, providing a robust dataset to examine.
Immediately it is evident that the number of crashes has steadily decreased from the beginning of the
dataset. In 1989, there were 1,372 crashes involving multiple vehicles and 1,428 crashes involving a
single vehicle, for a total of 2,800 crashes. Compared to 2021, there was an overall 70 percent decrease
to 843 crashes, with 367 crashes involving multiple vehicles and 476 involving a single-vehicle.

The dashboard is focused on answering three questions based on the data:

• When do crashes happen?

• Where do crashes happen?
• Who is involved in crashes?

When do crashes happen?

To examine when crashes happen, the dashboard focuses on two parameters:

• Time of Day
o Crashes by Time of Day is represented with a pie graph that shows data for crashes that
occur in the daytime and at night. As there were only two data points, day or night, the
pie graph was a good way to show if there was any difference in crash occurrence.
While people might think that most crashes occur in the evening due to low visibility,
the data has shown that 57 percent of crashes occur during the day. This is probably due
to most people being asleep and off the roads at night.
• Day of the Week
o Crashes by Day of the week is represented with a heatmap, which shows that the most
crashes occur on Saturday, indicated with a red box, followed by Friday and Saturday
indicated with an orange box. Monday and Tuesday have the least number of crashes,
as indicated with dark blue boxes.

When looking at these parameters across all the data, one could conclude that most crashes occur on
Saturday during the day.

Where do crashes happen?

The dataset contained many different fields to indicate where crashes might occur, unfortunately, some
of them, like road type did not have enough data to accurately draw conclusions. Three parameters had
enough data to best represent where crashes occur:

• Crashes by State
o Australia is composed of six states and two territories. Crash occurrences for all eight
areas are represented by a heat map. The ability to be able to represent the heat map
data visually as a map of Australia would have been preferable, and more visually
appealing, but this functionality was not present in the version of Lumira used. The heat
map does still visually indicate that most crashes occur in New South Wales, followed by
Victoria. There were three states/territories that had the least occurrence of crashes,
Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania and Northern Territory. These are also the areas
within Australia with the least population.
• Crashes by Remoteness Area
o The Australian government has designated five classes of remoteness and accessibility
for the country based on the access to services, these are major cities, inner regional,
outer regional, remote and very remote. These classes would therefore also indicate
how dense an area is. This data was also represented in a heat map and shows that the
most crashes occur in major cities and inner regional Australia.
• Crashes by Speed Limit Groups
o The dataset included the speed limit on the road where the crash occurred. This data
consisted of specific numbers and ranges, so it was best represented by grouping the
data. The speed limit groups correlate to the type of road the crash most likely occurred
on. As mentioned above road type was a parameter included in the data set but the
majority of the data was missing. By grouping the speed limits, some conjecture can also
be made about the type of road where the crash occurred. Most crashes occurred on
roads with speed limits of 100 to 119 kilometers per hour which are highway speeds,
followed by roads with speed limits of 60 to 79 kilometers per hour which are typically
smaller highways and arterial roads. 1 Together these three parameters indicate that
crashes most commonly occur on small and major highway in the more populated and
infrastructure dense regions of Australia.

Who is involved in vehicle crashes?

To determine who was involved in vehicle crashes, the dashboard looks at the vehicle involved in the
crash, the gender of the driver and the age of the driver.

• Crashes by Road User and Gender

o Road user classifies the primary vehicle or pedestrian involved in each crash. The
categories include driver and passenger for automobiles, pedestrian, motorcycle rider
and motorcycle pillion passenger and pedal cyclist. The categories are further classified
by gender in a stacked bar graph. The graph shows that automobile drivers are involved

1
At some point, I believe I broke the heat map for Crashes by Speed Limit Group. Initially, it was showing a clear
difference among the different speed limit groups, but at some point, most of the boxes took on the same dark red
color. I was unable to determine how to reset this but still felt a heat map was a good way to highlight this data.
 in most crashes. The next road user group is automobile passengers, although that
number is about half of automobile drivers. The graph also shows that men are involved
in most crashes, across all road user classifications.
• Age Range
o The data set was broken out by age range. This data is displayed as a pie graph. Visually
you can see that three age groups are roughly the same size that are involved in most
crashes. At a closer look, the data labels show that people within the age ranges of 17 to
25, 26 to 39 and 40 to 69 are involved in 26.1%, 23.4% and 25.4% of crashes,
respectively. Drivers aged 17 to 25 are generally thought to be the most at-risk drivers,
but as can be seen from the data, they are only involved in 1.3% more crashes than 40-
to 69-year-olds.

After examining these three parameters, it seems that male drivers of automobiles between the ages of
17 to 69 are most likely to be involved in a crash.

Data visualization is a great way to quickly share data and for data to be quickly absorbed. One of the
best features of dashboards and data visualization is the ability to drill down into the data. This
dashboard contains three controls to further examine the data by Age Groups, Year and State. For
example, when adjusting the controls to look at 17- to 25-year-olds in Queensland, most of the trends
from the larger group stay the same, except for Crashes by Time of Day, which now shows that 57.7% of
crashes involving this group occur at night. Additionally, when examining crashes involving 75-year-olds
and older, you can see that 85.9% of crashes occur in the daytime, and while drivers of automobiles are
still the most likely to be involved in a crash, the next group is pedestrians.

With these drill-down statistics, you can see the larger picture from the population across an extended
period, but to also create a story about an 18-year-old male from Queensland involved in an automobile
crash driving home at 2 AM or the 80-year-old grandmother walking home from the store in the
morning that is almost hit by a car. The ability to use the data to create a persona means the data
presented will be more easily remembered.