When Laurie Whelan hears about someone who's died in a car crash, he feels the family's pain.
"You experience it … you know it," he said.
"I certainly feel for the families where that's happened just recently to them."
While Victoria has had a horror week on the roads with 10 lives lost in four days, Mr Whelan has just marked 21 years since his wife and two teenage daughters were killed in a car crash.
It was May 29, 2002.
"It was just a normal, average morning. The girls were getting ready for school," he said.
Mr Whelan's wife Julie, 40, left to drop their 17-year-old daughter Kellie and their 13-year-old daughter Ruth at school.
On her L-plates, Kellie was driving.
The car they were in collided with a truck on an icy Sutton Grange Road in Sedgwick, Central Victoria.
A coroner determined the fatal crash was a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
No matter the cause or the conditions that day, nothing eases the loss for Mr Whelan and his surviving daughter Kate.
"My eldest daughter, Kellie, was learning to drive," he said.
"You think, now they'd be 32 and 39 … what would they be doing now? That loss continues.
"We try to honour the people they were and what they could have been."
Driver behaviour, not road conditions
When rural roads are the site of horrific fatal crashes, people can be quick to point to the deteriorating condition of the roads.
But Victoria Police said driver behaviour appeared to have caused most of this month's fatal crashes, not road conditions.
Highway Patrol Senior Sergeant Ian Brooks said this year's high road toll was "heartbreaking".
"It's preventable things like driver attention, high speeds and distraction — they're primarily the causes of the crashes we see," he said.
The state's road toll this year now stands at 134 lives lost — up from 96 at the same time last year.
Of those deaths, 78 occurred in regional Victoria.
"We're losing members of our community in preventable collisions," Senior Sergeant Brooks said.
"In Hamilton, the community is going to suffer for a long time because they've lost four members of their community."
Winter road warning
As we enter winter, police are urging motorists to drive to the conditions.
"We're going to have days where there's low light, low visibility, rain," Senior Sergeant Brooks said.
"People are just not driving to the conditions and not paying attention to the road they're driving on."
He said when driving on regional roads, concentration was key.
"In a lot of cases, especially across intersection collisions, somebody has disobeyed a stop sign or giveaway sign," Senior Sergeant Brooks said.
"They're driving on unfamiliar roads, but still travelling at 100 kilometres an hour and not paying attention to what's what's around them.
"They're driving for longer hours, and they're just losing concentration at the wheel. And unfortunately, that's costing lives."
