A quarter of road deaths recorded during the 22-day Victoria Police holiday road blitz happened in Hobsons Bay and Maribyrnong.
Assistant Commissioner Doug Fryer said 12 people died on Victoria’s roads during Operation Roadwise, which ran from December 13 to January 3.
Two teenagers died when their car ran off the Princes Freeway at Altona, before the Kororoit Creek Road exit, on December 29.
The car hit a tree and burst into flames.
Police said the driver, Ethan Watson-Day, 18, of Yarraville, had obtained his licence only about a week earlier.
They said his passenger, Jarrod Beven, 16, from Altona North, had been trying to obtain directions by phone.
Assistant Commissioner Fryer said it was more than likely that inexperience, inattention and distraction led to the crash.
“How will their families ever deal with the loss of such young lives?” he said. “How would you deal with the loss of a loved one?”
Yarraville Glory Football Club, where the teens played soccer, expressed its condolences in a statement.
“Ethan and Jarrod were highly respected players in the YGFC under-18/senior reserve squads and will be sadly missed by everyone at the club,” the statement said.
David Dedic, a close friend of both boys, said people did not understand the actual toll of road trauma. “They see a statistic, a figure, say two deaths, and go, ‘It’s just another statistic, another figure’,” he said. “But they don’t actually realise the number of lives those two people affected. Like the whole of Altona … we all knew them.”
A man died on December 30 when gas cylinders on his truck exploded and the vehicle crashed into a fence on the corner of Barkly Street and Gordon Street in Footscray.
The driver, a 24-year-old Deer Park man, died at the scene.
VicRoads chief executive John Merritt said 11 more drivers were killed on the state’s roads in 2015 than in 2014.
Under Operation Roadwise, 12 drink-drivers were detected in Hobsons Bay.
Police detected 38 unregistered vehicles and caught 15 unlicensed and nine disqualified drivers.
They also booked nine drivers for speeding offences, four people disobeying traffic controls, one motorist not wearing a seatbelt and two using mobile phones.
In Maribyrnong, police detected 29 unregistered vehicles and 12 drink-drivers, eight people driving unlicensed, 11 speeders, 11 disobeying traffic controls, one without a seatbelt and one using a mobile phone.
They also detected 20 pedestrian offences and one cyclist breaking the law.
