THE HOLIDAY ROAD TOLL IS BOTH A TRAGEDY AND A DISGRACE. When the holiday road toll ended at 8.00am this morning the death toll had reached seventeen. That is an appalling indictment on us as a nation and represents a huge fail in the highly publicised zero tolerance 100km/h speed limit. It is of some comfort I suppose to know that Oamaru and the Waitaki District avoided any fatalities and also there appears to have been no serious road crashes. I have written about cars, the motor industry and road safety for more than 50 years and I have long held the view that the cause of NZs Third World road toll is a combination of several factors. Our approach to road safety has always been one of dumbing down drivers with fear campaigns and increasingly tough enforcement. Of the 17 deaths, Police say eight are believed to have been due to excessive speed and/or drink — almost the total focus of police road safety holiday campaign. But what about the other nine? In most years, 23 - 24 percent of our fatalities are caused by excessive speed and/or drink driving. Again, what about the other 75+ percent? The problem with the almost total focus on speed and drink to lower the road toll is that, apart from totally missing the chief cause of road crashes, it also instills a bullet-proof belief in most of us that because I dont drink/drive or speed, Im OK and that doesnt affect me. Wrong! There is no easy or quick fix to our appalling road toll which is one of the worst in First World countries. We kill twice as many people per head of population than most other similar countries. And this includes Germany where it is still legal to drive at 300km./h on about 50 percent of the autobhans. But. drive on German autobahns and compare them with driver behaviour on, say, Auckland motorways and you begin to understand what is wrong with us. In Germany lane discipline is superb. The outside (fast lane is for passing only, or the high speed motorist. Trucks are all confined to the inner (slow) lane unless passing a slower truck and then they get back into the slow lane. So there is not the willy-nllly mix of 45-50 tonne trucks and fragile two tonne cars that we have in NZ. Fixing our road toll will be a generational project because the issues are deeply ingrained in our national; psyche. 1. We are a nation of risk takers with a gung ho streak. 2. We believe that getting a drivers license is a right — not something to be earned like a degree at University. 3. Very few of us, if any, will willingly admit that we are lousy drivers. The fix. The very first thing we need to do is to admit that we have a serious, serious problem with tragic end results. Then we put in place a programme of driver training and driver education copied straight from Germany where driver skills and discipline are paramount knowing it will take 20 years to make any difference,. After all, pilots of aircraft have to undergo levels of training that NZ motorists dont even begin to come close to. Our car fleet is old and getting older meaning too many of our cars lack the latest safety equipment. If we are serious abut lowering the road toll, we have to get tougher on old cars and get them off the road. Our attitude to our cars is a bit gung ho like our attitude to driving. Lets stop blaming our roads and foreign tourists. I have driven at 300km/h in Germany on a stretch of autobahn that was not up to the same standard as Aucklands Southern Motorway. And secondary roads are pretty much the same in most First World Countries. But there is always room for improvement. And NZ doesnt not have the market cornered on foreign drivers and tourists. And when we go overseas, we are foreign drivers too. Thats a red-herring.. In bullet points: 1. Driver education and tougher standards for drivers licenses. This is critical and it will take a strong willed government to introduce these changes. 2. Improve the modernity of our car fleet. 3. Reduce the dangerous mix of large truck/trailer units and cars. 4. Continue to improve our roads. I would have no objection to the bullying and punitive actions that masquerade as road safety in New Zealand if there was a realisation and acceptance of the issues and we were addressing those.
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 23:53:42 +0000
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