With just a few clicks of the mouse the website will take you to a page showing the road toll statistics for the Bathurst Regional Council area across a five-year period from 2013-2017.

Dots plotted on an a map of the Bathurst LGA show the location of every reported road crash across those five years with different colours indicating whether people suffered minor, moderate or serious injuries, or whether the crash resulted in one or more deaths.

These fatalities are represented by a red dot. And there are 22 dots on the map.

Those simple dots are a chilling reminder of just how vulnerable we can all be on the roads. The circumstances that led to those dots might be different in each case, but they also have much in common.

Each of those dots represents a wasted life, a loss of potential, and a group of family members and friends left behind to grieve.

And those dots are the reason the return of the award-winning Rotary Young Driver Awareness (RYDA) program to Mount Panorama this week is so important.

For more than a decade, RYDA has put Year 11 students in front of police officers, crash survivors and professional driving instructors right at the stage of life when they are preparing to get behind the wheel themselves.

For many of the participants, it is the only access to professional driving instructors they will receive but, for all participants, the lessons they learn can be the difference between life and death.

There are more distractions than ever for young drivers as they get behind the wheel and a one-day program alerting them to the potential consequences of bad decisions is an investment in their future.

By coincidence, the return of RYDA to Bathurst came on the same day that the NSW Government announced that tough new penalties for drink-driving would come into effect in just two weeks.

From May 20, even low-range drink-driving offences will attract an automatic three-month loss of licence. Plenty see it as a harsh penalty for just one too many drinks but it is the message it sends that is most important.

Every life lost on the road is one too many and we can never stop looking for ways to bring down the toll. Three months without a licence would be a small price to pay.