A picture of tragedy

Fatalities and Serious Injuries to Pedestrians in Greater Sydney

and

Apr 03, 2024

With a lot being made about road safety at the moment we thought we would highlight the geographic spread of Fatalities and Serious Injuries that occurred to pedestrians between 2018 and 2022, particularly in relation to urban streets (30 to 60kmh posted limit). We have coloured the streets green (30kmh), lime (40kmh), yellow (50kmh) and red (60kmh), and pedestrian victim crashes yellow (serious injury) and red (fatality).

We hope this information starts to highlight the degree to which pedestrian safety is a substantial, widespread issue that cannot be solved without systemic change, particularly around designing with children in mind.

First, here's a picture of the FSIs for metro Sydney:

Pretty bad, huh - notice that fatalities and serious injuries cluster in high activity areas, but do not necessarily decline between 60, 50 and even 40kmh, although fatalites do decline at 40. The limited 30kmh zones like Centennial Park do perform significantly better (no fatalities, 3 serious injuries), despite a similar level of all injuries, including minor injuries (not shown here).

Even so, “safer speeds” above 30 are still not that safe, as you can see better in this zoomed in (1:50,000) map of inner Sydney fatalities:

Now let's look at another map:

This map is definitionally tragic. It is the specific subset of the above relating only to “pedestrians in a toy car” (read: children). At least fatalities are rare. These crashes generally lie off the major road network in our 50kmh suburbs, although 40kmh streets in Balmain and the city are not immune. Nevetheless we are seriously injuring our kids in the hundreds on our streets.

Breaking down FSIs (for all pedestrians now) by major centres: