Speed is one most important factors for commuters. While it has its benefits in saving travelling time, it comes with immense risks. Victoria’s publicly available crash data help in document current weaknesses in the road system and guides improvements. The data reveals that about 75% of all reported crashes happens in speed zones above 50 km/hr (Department of Transport and Planning, 2026).
Source: Victoria road crash data, crash table, 2012 to 2026 (Department of Transport and Planning 2026).
Though it is a known fact that high-speed zones carry more risk, the time of day plays a cricual role that helps us narrow down the most crucial hours of the day vulnerable to fatal crashes.
Explore the Chart: Clicking on the legends in the line chart will make the specific line dissapear and reappear. The line chart and map chart are linked and interacting with the line chart points will filter the map chart. Clicking on the time period and speed zone will show a detailed spread of fatal accidents across Victoria After a selection has been made from the line chart, you must click on clear selection to reset the map filter.
Source: Victoria road crash data, crash table, 2012 to 2026 (Department of Transport and Planning 2026).
High speed zones experience the highest fatality rate ranging between 4% and 8% around the clock. This is more dangerous than low-speed zones, which range between 0.7% to 1.4% fatal accidents.
Across all speed zones, it is especially during the early hours of the day between 12am to 3am when the fatality rate is at its peak in all speed zone categories. Rates drop immediately when daylight approaches. It gives us an insight into the need for better lighting in most affected places.
Medium-speed zones sit in between. Their fatality rates range between 1% during the hours 6 am to 6pm and and about 3.6% during midnight to 6am time window.
The map shows where and when the fatal crashes happen at different places and time of day. Each speed zone has its trade-offs and these give us an idea of the where the severe road crashes occurs. These map data points contain valuable information such as speed zone of that road and time of day.
Source: Victoria road crash data, crash and node tables, 2012 to 2026 (Department of Transport and Planning 2026).
The charts use the crash and node tables from the Victoria road crash datasets (Department of Transport and Planning, 2026), covering January 2012 to February 2026. The pie chart counts all crashes, the line and map charts shows the share of crashes that were fatal. Each crash record is counted once. About 15,000 crashes did not have the speed zone recorded and these records were excluded. All different speed zones were grouped into categories of different speed levels like low speed (50 km/hr or less), medium speed (51-80 km/hr) and high speed zones (over 80 km/hr). Each individual time of day records were grouped into interval of 3hr time duration.
I used Claude (Sonnet 5.5, Anthropic) for the following purpose:
I chose the topic and data, designed the story, generated charts and reviewed the code before submitting
Department of Transport and Planning (2026). Victoria road crash data [Data set]. DataVic. https://discover.data.vic.gov.au/dataset/victoria-road-crash-data