A levy charged to people who drive large SUVs in the city has been mooted as a possible way to curb Victoria’s “skyrocketing” road deaths since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Road safety experts this week told the Victorian government’s inquiry into road safety for vulnerable road users that fatal accidents had risen amid the “many and lingering” changes to road travel behaviour wrought by the pandemic.
Victoria’s Traffic Accident Commission has recorded 186 road fatalities this year, up 23.2% on 2022 figures. Pedestrian deaths on roads were up 8%. Other states have also recorded increases.
Ingrid Johnston from the Australasian College of Road Safety said trauma rates had increased even since the inquiry was called.
The trend began in 2020, when “traffic dropped but trauma rates didn’t drop as much as you’d expect”, Johnston said. “And following that we’ve seen the rates skyrocket.”
In Victoria the decrease in kilometres travelled was 14% greater than the decrease in road trauma, the peak body’s submission to the committee says.
Among the strategies put forward by the ACRS to help mitigate the problem were financial disincentives for the use of large SUVs, which are known to particularly affect vulnerable road users such as cyclists.
“It’s being done elsewhere. To disincentivise people from purchasing these cars in the first place, you could increase import tax,” Johnston said.
“You could try to disincentivise them being used in the middle of cities, so you could have a levy for bringing a vehicle of a certain size. You could increase registration fees.”
More than 50% of new vehicles sold in Australia last year were SUVs, while SUV and light commercial vehicle sales combined have risen from 45.3% of total vehicle sales in 2012 to 76.8% in 2022.
Large SUVs increased the risk of serious injury to other road users by about a third more than medium-sized SUVs, said Prof Stuart Newstead of Monash University’s Accident Research Centre.
“They are problematic,” he said. “Commercial vehicles provide some of the highest risks of killing road users when they collide with them, but that disbenefit is not offset by any safety benefit to their own occupants.”
Paris last month moved to charge SUV drivers higher parking fees to reduce pollution and tackle “auto-besity”.
While financial disincentives have been shown to benefit road safety in Europe, Australia must first remove incentives encouraging the purchase of large SUV-type vehicles, Newstead said.
“The principal problem we have in terms of vehicle safety at the moment is our penchant for buying 4X4 utes in general,” he said.
“We need to stop incentivising their purchase – a lot of them are being bought as a business tool and not being used as a business tool.”
Marion Terrill, a transport and cities expert at the Grattan Institute, said Australia’s fringe benefits tax exemptions “incentivise the purchase of larger vehicles”.
She believes charging a fee or levy to drivers of large SUV for safety reasons would be an effective reform.
“The signals the governments are giving people is that there is nothing wrong with larger cars,” she said.
“If you have to pay more for a larger car, that will affect your decision.”
Other pandemic-linked road behaviour changes that may have affected road safety include a drop in public transport use, a rise in bicycles and e-scooters on roads and an increase in mental health issues.
There has also been an increased reliance on food delivery drivers, and the ACRS is calling for regulations to protect them.
Two food delivery drivers have died in road accidents in Sydney in the past month, while 13 workers are known to have died in Australia in the transport gig worker industry since 2017.
