Peer review stream Cairney Proceedings of the 2014 Australasian Road Safety Research, Policing & Education Conference 12 – 14 November, Grand Hyatt Melbourne Priorities for crash countermeasures in Australia and New Zealand – an overview based on Safe Systems principles Cairney, P., Bradshaw, C. & Turner, B. ARRB Group Abstract This work was part of a project to provide information on key fatal and serious crash types across Australia and New Zealand, and to benchmark safety performance of different road stereotypes between jurisdictions. The entire dataset of casualty crashes occurring in Australia and New Zealand from 2001 to 2010 was assembled. So far as possible, differences between the different data sets were reconciled to create a single database for Australia and another for New Zealand. Where this was not possible, those jurisdictions which could not be reconciled with the overall classification were omitted from that part of the analysis. In line with Safe System principles, results were presented as fatal and serious injury crashes contrasted with all casualty crashes, generating some important insights for crash countermeasure priorities. Some types of crash had large proportions of fatal and serious injury crashes, while other types of crash had relatively small percentages of these crashes but such high overall frequencies that they accounted for a large proportion of the fatal and serious injury crashes. Key crash types for Australia were off-path, head-on, adjacent approaches, and same direction crashes, and for New Zealand the key crash types were loss-of-control on curve, crossing/turning, loss-of-control on a straight, and rear-end/ obstruction. In Australia, the largest number of fatal and serious injury crashes occurred on urban arterial roads; while in New Zealand, the greatest number occurred on rural roads. Plans for further analyses in terms of crash rates for benchmarking will be described in the paper. Introduction The issue Safe System principles aim to ensure that no individual is killed or permanently impaired as a result of a traffic collision, which leads to a focus on eliminating the possibility of road fatalities and serious injuries (FSI). Until now, Australia has had no single crash database that holds casualty crash data for all jurisdictions. There was a fatal crash database at the national level, but other data were only held within individual jurisdictions. More recently, the Bureau for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE) developed the National Crash Database (NCD), which includes both fatal and injury crashes. Since the NCD focusses on indicators for National Road Safety Strategy (NRSS) performance monitoring, it contains a reduced set of variables (i.e. fewer than those available on jurisdiction-based databases) and a smaller period of coverage (personal communication, Tim Risbey, BITRE, June 2013). As a result, there is no document that provides comprehensive analysis of crash factors by injury level in Australia. For this reason, planning at the national level and comparisons between jurisdictions has been difficult. The project This paper reports selected outcomes of the first year of an Austroads project ST 1763, Crash Analysis – Australian and New Zealand data. The project has the aims of establishing crash rates for different road stereotypes across Australia’s state road networks and New Zealand’s national network. The work reported in this paper is an aggregation of all fatalities and serious injuries resulting from the different types of road crashes in Australia and New Zealand.