The question

Some roads around Clayton are not up to a good standard. On 28 November 2026 Victorians vote again. Clayton is split between two safe Labor seats: Oakleigh (Clayton, Clayton North, Clayton East) and Clarinda (Clayton South).

This report asks two questions. Where and when do Clayton’s roads actually hurt people? And is there any sign that road frustration shows up at the ballot box?

Every chart is interactive. You can hover for details, click legend items to hide or show groups, and use the buttons above a chart to change the view.

1. Where the crashes happen

Between 2012 and 2025, police and hospital records list 1,970 injury crashes inside the Clayton study area. Of these, 701 were fatal or caused serious injury.

Chart 1 description: a street map of Clayton with one dot per injury crash. Dot colour shows severity, and larger dots are fatal or serious crashes. The buttons switch between all crashes, crashes that hurt a pedestrian or cyclist, and crashes after dark.

The crashes are not spread evenly across the suburb. Just three roads, Dandenong Road, Clayton Road and Centre Road, account for 38% of all injury crashes in the study area, out of 192 named roads where a crash was recorded.

2. Which roads carry the risk

Chart 2 description: horizontal stacked bars for the 12 Clayton roads with the most injury crashes, split by severity. The “Share by severity” button rescales every bar to 100%, so you can compare how often a crash on each road is serious, not just how many crashes there are.

3. Is it getting better?

Chart 3 description: two lines show yearly injury crashes as an index, where 2012 equals 100. One line is the Clayton study area and the other is the rest of Victoria. Dotted lines mark state elections. Use the slider under the chart to zoom into a period. Indexing lets a small suburb and the whole state share one scale.

4. When the danger peaks

Chart 4 description: a heatmap with days of the week down the side and hours of the day across the top. Darker cells mean more crashes. The buttons switch between all crashes and crashes that hurt a pedestrian or cyclist, which shows whether the people walking and riding around Monash and the shopping strips face a different peak time from drivers.

5. Does any of this show up in the vote?

At the 2022 election, the 4 Clayton voting centres gave Labor an average first-preference vote of 46%, compared with 45.4% across the other booths in Oakleigh and Clarinda. The informal vote is one possible signal of disengagement. It averaged 6.7% in Clayton booths and 5.6% elsewhere.

Chart 5 description: each bubble is one 2022 voting centre in Oakleigh (circles) or Clarinda (diamonds). The horizontal position is Labor’s first-preference vote, the vertical position is the informal vote, and bubble size is the number of votes cast. Clayton booths are highlighted in orange. Hover over a bubble for the full party breakdown, or click legend items to isolate a group.

What to watch on 28 November

These charts show where and when Clayton’s roads hurt people. Booth results alone cannot show why people vote the way they do, and a crash map does not measure potholes or surface quality directly. Still, the pattern raises a fair question for a seat that is rarely contested: if road safety in Clayton is concentrated on a handful of state-managed arterials, does a safe seat get the same attention as a marginal one? The 2026 booth results will show whether Clayton’s voters stay with Labor, drift to other candidates, or show more disengagement through informal votes.

Limitations. The crash data covers only crashes reported to police or hospitals that caused an injury, so near misses and vehicle damage from poor road surfaces are not included. The study area is a rectangle around Clayton, so it includes some edges of neighbouring suburbs. Electorate boundaries changed in 2021, so booths are compared within 2022 only. Early, postal and absent votes are not allocated to booths, so booth shares describe election-day voters only.

Data processing

  • Crash data: I downloaded the flat crash file from the Department of Transport and Planning, standardised the column names, recoded severity and light condition into readable labels, and derived the weekday and year from the crash date. I then kept crashes whose coordinates fall inside a bounding box around Clayton, Clayton North and Clayton South. Only complete calendar years are used for the trend.
  • Election data: I scraped the first-preference results tables for Oakleigh and Clarinda districts from the VEC website using rvest. I grouped candidates into Labor, Liberal, Greens and Others, then calculated each group’s share of formal votes and the informal share of total votes. Voting centres with 100 or fewer votes were removed because their shares are unstable. Booths with “Clayton” in their name are labelled as Clayton booths.
  • All charts were built in R with plotly.

References

Department of Transport and Planning. (2026). Victoria road crash data [Data set]. DataVic. https://discover.data.vic.gov.au/dataset/victoria-road-crash-data

Victorian Electoral Commission. (2022a). Clarinda District results by voting centre: 2022 State election [Data set]. https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-by-district/clarinda-district-results/clarinda-district-results-by-voting-centre

Victorian Electoral Commission. (2022b). Oakleigh District results by voting centre: 2022 State election [Data set]. https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/state-election-results/2022-state-election-results/results-by-district/oakleigh-district-results/oakleigh-district-results-by-voting-centre

Sievert, C. (2020). Interactive web-based data visualization with R, plotly, and shiny. Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://plotly-r.com