Trauma: frequent crash locations
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Swanston St alongside Flinders Street station, and the Beach Road / Balcombe Road roundabout, have emerged as high crash locations from a study by VicRoads of bicycle and motor vehicle collisions that lead to hospitalisations.
An average of 12.5 crashes occur outside Flinders St Station each year. 78% of the crashes at this site were when riders hit opening car doors. Based on the estimated number of riders going past this point, there is a crash every 27,000 trips.
Collins Street is next on the list. With roughly the same number of riders per year it has an average of 2.7 crashes every year in the mid block. This is one crash every 126,000 trips.
The Balcombe Road roundabout has had 11 crashes over the last six years or 1.83 each year. 45% of these crashes occurred when drivers did not give way to riders on the roundabout. The St George's Road roundabout is next with 1.67 crashes each year. The Pigdon Canning roundabout in Princes Hill and the Haymarket roundabout between Flemington Road and Elizabeth Street also feature in the top 10 intersections.
Swanston and Flinders is the 'normal' intersection with the most crashes and is third on the intersection list with 1.5 crashes each year.
VicRoads and Councils will be developing proposals for these locations, green paint on the Flinders Street Station section of Swanston Street is likely to reduce collisions. Due to the frequency of crashes, VicRoads says that road safety allocations can be used to improve these locations.