SIXTEEN people have lost their lives on central Victoria’s roads so far this year.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
While the region appears to be bucking the statewide trend of rising fatalities - Transport Accident Commission data shows 30 people died from road trauma within central Victoria last year - that still leaves dozens of families, circles of friends, workplaces, schools, sporting clubs and social groups shaken by the loss of a loved one.
Four of those people have been killed within the boundaries of the City of Greater Bendigo in those nine months, just one less death than the municipality saw in the whole of 2015.
As it stands, someone, somewhere in Victoria loses their life or suffers serious injury through road trauma every two hours.
So far this year 218 people have died on Victorian roads, a significant increase on the 188 people who had been killed at the same time last year.
Over the past decade, 319 people have lost their lives on the roads of central Victoria, including the municipalities of Buloke, Campaspe, Central Goldfields, Gannawarra, City of Greater Bendigo, Hepburn, Loddon, Macedon Ranges, Mitchell and Mount Alexander.
Young people died in greater numbers than any other age group, with 67 people aged between 18 and 25 among those who died, despite that age group making up just 13 per cent of licence holders in Victoria.
More than half of those young people were aged between just 18 and 20, and more than three-quarters were male.
Sixty-three of those people killed in central Victoria died within the locality of the City of Greater Bendigo and again, young people were over-represented.
Last year saw a dramatic increase in the number of young driver and passenger deaths across Victoria.
Eighteen drivers between 18 and 20 years old were killed last year, up from eight the previous year, while 11 passengers of the same age died, up from four.
Overall, men are dying on the region’s roads in greater numbers than women, with more than twice as many men killed by road trauma in the past decade than women.
The same trend was seen statewide last year, when 75 per cent of driver fatalities were men.
People travelling on country roads are at significantly greater risk of dying than those driving in the city.
VicRoads data from last year shows that according to vehicle kilometres travelled, the risk of dying is twice as high on country roads as on city roads, and on a population basis, the risk of fatalities is about four times higher in country Victoria than in Melbourne.
Two-thirds of the deaths on country roads involve country people.