An analysis by the Australian Road Safety Foundation has found 906 people died on roads outside the capital cities in 2025 — a 10.5 per cent increase on 2024, and what the foundation understands to be the highest number of regional fatalities since 2020, the ABC reports. Deaths on rural, regional and remote roads made up nearly 70 per cent of the national road toll last year, despite only about 25 per cent of the population living in those places.
Peter Kalbfell knows the road that nearly ended his life. "There is a lot of nothing out there, you know," he said. "Miles and miles and miles of nothing." In January 2000, driving home to Alice Springs after a Christmas holiday in Maryborough — a trip he and his then-girlfriend had made countless times, which he concedes made them "a bit more complacent" about fatigue — he undid his seatbelt to get comfortable while she took the wheel. "We were pushing pretty hard to get back and I'd driven through the night," he said. Police later told him the car veered off the road near Kynuna and rolled seven or eight times, crushing him underneath. The crash left him an incomplete quadriplegic; his girlfriend sustained minor injuries.
The complacency trap
The study, released last month, found complacency was one of the main causes of risk-taking on regional roads, with many drivers saying they broke road rules because they believed it was safe to do so on familiar routes. "We've somehow outsourced that responsibility; whether it's to government, or it's to police, or it's to road builders or car manufacturers," ARSF president Russell White said. The foundation's advice is deliberately simple: look as far ahead as possible and scan for obstacles, don't drive on autopilot, and give yourself time and space to take evasive action.
Ioni Lewis, an expert in driver psychology at the Queensland University of Technology, said the findings correlate with a "longstanding overrepresentation" of road trauma outside the cities — one that became evident when the federal government began splitting crash data by urban and regional areas in 2017. "There is that perception that the crashes are because of people who are unfamiliar, they haven't travelled here before," Professor Lewis said. "But the data certainly doesn't suggest that's the case." Even the seatbelt problem differs by geography: city drivers are more likely to wear one incorrectly, she said, while regional drivers tend not to wear one at all.
The Wide Bay's five bad years
Fatalities in Kalbfell's home region of the Wide Bay have led Queensland's road toll for the past five years. Detective Senior Sergeant Wade Lee has attended more than 100 crashes in a 35-year career there — and was himself the victim of a head-on collision on duty in 2021, when another vehicle lost control in the wet and hit his unmarked police car, which was then rear-ended by a semi-trailer. "It is a trauma that [can] be stopped, if we could change that driver behaviour," he said. His prescription starts in the passenger seat: "Having the courage to say, 'Hey mate, slow down … it's raining,' or 'Mate, there's roadworks up ahead.' That in itself is a pretty easy conversation to have."
Lee now helps organise a Rotary young driver's course — instructed by Kalbfell, who these days is president and head coach of the Fraser Coasters Wheelchair Basketball Club. "We don't want to see anybody go through what I've been through, or what [Wade] has seen on the roads, the carnage," Kalbfell said. "The message we try and get across is making smart choices, especially in the area that we live in."