How not to be killed by wildlife

In the past decade, more than 250,000 accidents occurred on Queensland road network among which 3,702 were fatal. A study published by the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development in 2006 found that each fatality was costing the government $2.4 million and the overall cost to the government is appalling.

Whilst traffic engineers have worked tirelessly to enhance the road safety by implementing engineering measures to curtail the number of accidents on Queensland’s road network. Randgroup believe that some of the accidents could be avoided or downgraded if tackled from a different perspective.

The philosophy adopted in this study is that since a successful event would not happen without careful planning to ensure that every aspects has been taken care of. An accident is less likely to happen without a chain reaction involving multiple factors. If we can identify and remove one of multiple factors which are likely contributed to such accidents, it is highly likely we can reduced the amount of such accidents.

Randgroup employs accident history of the vehicles hit by animals on the Queensland road network as the example to demonstrate the utilisation of this philosophy.

In the past decade there were more than 2,500 such accidents resulting in 32 fatalities which amounts to more than a $8.9 billion dollars loss for the government.

A regression chart was produced to demonstrate the distribution of the accidents involving animals at different time of the day. It was noticed that the peak of such accidents happened at morning from 5:00am to 7:00am and 5:00pm to 7:00pm.

This finding could be used to alert drivers especially those driving on rural state highways to try avoid driving during such time or be more alert during these times. In addition, against the backdrop that each year the amount of oversea visitors choose to self-driving is increasing, it is necessary to ensure such information has been passed through by car rental companies.

RandGroup produced a geospatial interactive map to illustrate the geographic distribution of such accidents. It was also suspected that majority of such accidents are close to locations where a creek or water source are near the road. It is at this stage suspected that total rain amount in the past week and the location of the water course near the road are likely factors which could contribute to the hit animal type accidents. However due to the constrain of timing and resources, the team is not able to acquire the clean the data to further prove the theory,

When a full scale study is completed, the authority could base on such factors to issues warnings accordingly to drivers to alert them the likelihood of such accidents.