In a typical suburb, one road carries a third of the crashes that kill or hospitalise someone. In some country suburbs it is every one of them.
Across 2,003 suburbs in Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales, the median suburb has 33% of its fatal and serious-injury crashes on a single road. In a quarter of them one road carries half or more, and in 25 it carries every one. Busy suburbs spread their crashes out; country suburbs concentrate them.
Every suburb page on SuburbScan now counts the crashes inside the suburb where someone was killed or admitted to hospital, and names the roads they happened on. Put 2,003 suburbs side by side and one pattern stands out: in the typical suburb, a single road accounts for a third of those crashes.
That figure is the median. In a quarter of the suburbs one road carries half or more, and in 25 suburbs every serious crash in five years was on the same road.
| Suburbs | One road's share, median | One road carries half or more | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Victoria (2021 to 2025) | 576 | 30.0% | 17.9% of suburbs |
| Queensland (2020 to 2024) | 821 | 33.3% | 27.5% |
| New South Wales (2020 to 2024) | 606 | 37.5% | 30.0% |
| All three | 2,003 | 33.3% | 25.5% |
The suburbs counted are those with at least ten serious crashes over the five years, which is 62,525 crashes between them. Below ten, one road "carrying half" can mean three crashes out of five.
Busy suburbs spread their crashes out
How concentrated a suburb's crashes are depends mostly on how many it has. The more crashes, the more roads they are spread across:
| Serious crashes in the suburb | Suburbs | One road's share, median | One road carries half or more |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 to 19 | 934 | 42.9% | 41.5% of suburbs |
| 20 to 49 | 743 | 30.0% | 14.5% |
| 50 to 99 | 257 | 23.6% | 5.8% |
| 100 or more | 69 | 19.0% | none |
In the Melbourne CBD, the street with the most serious crashes is Elizabeth Street, with 12% of the suburb's total. In Dandenong it is Stud Road, with 9%. A dense grid of busy streets shares the load.
In the country, one road is often all of it
At the other end are small rural suburbs strung along a single highway or mountain road. Those are the 25 suburbs where one road carries every serious crash:
- Reefton, Victoria: all 18 on Woods Point Road, the winding mountain road east of Warburton.
- Wangetti, Queensland: all 21 on the Captain Cook Highway, the coastal road between Cairns and Port Douglas.
- Lower Beechmont, Queensland: all 17 on Beechmont Road, the climb into the Gold Coast hinterland.
- Gunderman, New South Wales: all 16 on Wisemans Ferry Road.
In places like these the road is the suburb's crash record. Almost every crash on it involves people driving through rather than people who live there, which is exactly why a crash count is not a measure of how safe a suburb is to live in.
It is usually not a highway
The worst road in a suburb is a highway, freeway or motorway in only 29.6% of the 2,003 suburbs. In the other 70.4% it is a local arterial or main street: Cranbourne's South Gippsland Highway is the exception, not the rule. The road with the most crashes in a suburb typically has 1.7 times as many as the road in second place.
Some roads turn up as the worst road again and again because they run through so many suburbs:
| Road | Suburbs where it is the worst road |
|---|---|
| Bruce Highway (Queensland) | 75 |
| Pacific Highway (Queensland and New South Wales) | 68 |
| Princes Highway (Victoria and New South Wales) | 42 |
| Great Western Highway (New South Wales) | 27 |
| Hume Highway (New South Wales and Victoria) | 25 |
In Victoria the most common worst road after the Princes Highway is simply High Street, the worst road in 13 suburbs, among them Reservoir, Northcote, Thornbury, Melton and Kangaroo Flat. It is a different High Street in each, and it is the old main road through every one of them.
What this is not
A crash is counted where it happened, not where the people in it live. A main road through a suburb brings its crashes with it, and the suburbs with the most crashes are mostly the ones people drive through: big centres, freeway interchanges, industrial areas and highway towns. We hold no traffic volumes, so we cannot say which road is most dangerous per car or per kilometre driven, and this is not a ranking of suburbs. What it does show is where the serious crashes in a suburb are: usually concentrated on one or two roads, and often on the one you would guess.
How we counted
- Crashes are the fatal and serious-injury crashes published by the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning (2021 to 2025), the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads (2020 to 2024) and Transport for NSW (2020 to 2024), each the latest five full calendar years. "Serious injury" means someone was admitted to hospital (Victoria, New South Wales) or hospitalised (Queensland).
- Each crash is placed in a suburb by its coordinates, against the ABS 2021 suburb boundaries. Road names are the publishers' own, with abbreviations spelled out ("Rd" as "Road"). A Victorian crash at an intersection counts against the road it was recorded on.
- Suburbs with fewer than ten serious crashes are left out of every figure above. A road's share is its crashes divided by the suburb's total, including crashes with no road recorded.
- South Australia's open crash data does not name roads, so it is not included. Western Australia, the Northern Territory and the ACT are not covered by our crash data.
Every suburb page on SuburbScan shows its serious crashes and the roads with three or more of them, and every property page shows the serious crashes within 250 metres.