The tragedy of the Safe System - it's not working on our roads

Tuesday, 3 April 2018

An all-too-familiar sight in New Zealand - a police cordon at a road accident.

OPINION: There's a triple set of tragic ironies contained in two important new items published on Stuff today.

The first item reported the fact that six people were killed on New Zealand's roads over the Easter holiday break. This was three times more than last year, and it took the total number of road deaths this year to 107 - way up from the 94 deaths over the same last year.

Only a very small portion of the country's highway network offers the safety of median barriers.

It led an appalled police national road policing manager Superintendent Steve Greally to appeal to motorists to use common sense on our roads - and in particular to slow down.

The second item covered a special report by the International Transport Forum - of which the New Zealand Government is a member - that says excessive speed is now a major road safety problem in every motorised country in the world, and that the only way to overcome this may be to reduce speed limits to just 70kmh on open roads that don't have median barriers, and to 30kmh in town.

The vast majority of our roads only have painted lines separating opposing traffic.

The number of vehicles on our roads is rapidly increasing. Is this contributing to New Zealand's growing crash rate?

* Top road cop calls Easter road toll 'heartbreaking'

* Driven to death: NZ's abysmal road toll**

That second item has sparked a major reaction, with readers expressing horror at even the thought of this country's speed limits being reduced.

And right there is the triple set of ironies. Large numbers of people strongly reacting to a suggestion that road speed limits should be reduced, on the very day the news media reports the worst Easter road toll in eight years.

What on earth is going wrong?

Is it simply because motorists are driving far too fast?

It is true that even the smallest of today's motor vehicles are quite capable of speeds way over the open road limit of 100kmh.

In fact most are capable of 200kmh - a scary thought, considering studies show that every 1 per cent increase in average vehicle speed results in a 2 per cent increase in the frequency of injury crashes, a 3 per cent increase in the frequency of severe crashes, and a 4 per cent increase in the frequency of fatal crashes.

Is it because of driver inattention?

Yes we know it is illegal to use a cellphone when driving, but how often do we see people driving one-handed, their phones stuck to their ears? Or holding coffees-to-go. Or yakking to their passengers. All the time in control of a missile speeding along a narrow piece of tarmac, with other missiles passing in the opposite direction only a couple of metres away.

Is it because of the standard of our roads?

It is true that only the heaviest-trafficked of our state highways have median barriers that separate vehicles travelling in opposite directions. All the rest have nothing other than painted lines, and at times quite a few don't even have that. And don't even think about what's on the sides of roads if vehicles leave the tarmac. Ditches, trees, power poles - they are all hazards with the potential to cause serious injury and death.

While we're discussing ironies, here's another one. New Zealand's transport authorities operate to what is called a Safe System, which was originally developed in Sweden and which recognises that people make mistakes. It aims for a more forgiving road system that is designed to protect people from death and serious injury.

Safe System wants to achieve this via such actions as improved road design, removal of roadside hazards, appropriate speed limits, advanced safety features in vehicles, and more in-vehicle technologies designed to keep drivers alert and reinforce compliance with the road rules.

But it's not working. New Zealand's road toll has risen every year for the past five years, with last year a particularly bad 12 months that saw 380 killed and at least 14,000 injured.

Part of the reason might be because the number of vehicles on our roads is quickly increasing - latest research suggests that the number of cars in Auckland alone is growing by 800 vehicles a week.

But all the fatal crashes over Easter were out of the cities where traffic volumes are much lower, and that's the scary thing. Little wonder then that at a media conference Steve Greally struggled to find the right word to describe how he feels about the continued tragedy. Heartbreaking, was the word he eventually selected.