Rural Road Safety Month 2023

September 2023 marks the sixth year of the Australian Road Safety Foundation’s (ARSF) Rural Road Safety Month. This initiative aims to highlight the additional risks when driving on rural and remote roads across Australia.

Rural road crashes account for more than 65% of the Australian road toll, and the rate of serious road-related injury in rural areas is nearly twice that of those in major cities. For this reason, it is important to bring awareness to this serious yet little-known issue.

Acusensus is committed to eliminating road fatalities across the road network, which includes regional roads. This is the reason why Acusensus solutions are transportable, as deployment needs to be available anytime, anywhere.

Acusensus is proud to be working with the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) to deploy Acusensus’ trailer-based Harmony solutions across regional Queensland roads. Harmony provides speed enforcement and its deployment aims to decrease road fatalities across regional Queensland by correcting driver behaviour. This addresses a prevalent issue as 299 people died on Queensland roads last year, the highest number of fatalities in the state in 10 years.

This issue is not relevant to just Queensland or those living in regional Australia, this commemorative month is applicable to all Australians no matter where they call home. A survey conducted in 2022 by ARSF found that high-risk rural roads are used by almost all Australians (91%) at least once a year and more than a third of drivers utilise regional roads at least once a week – living in the area accounts only for 27% of reasons for driving on regional roads.

For this reason, it is important to adopt the ARSF’s Rural Road Safety Month motto, ‘Be the change you want to see on the road.’

To learn more about Rural Road Safety Month, visit ARSF’s page.