Road kill - Must something be done about foreign drivers?
Friday, 27 February 2015
Imagine being Kejia Zheng. It was November 2012 and on the second day of her New Zealand holiday, the 20-year-old was driving herself from Lake Tekapo, heading south through the Lindis Pass.
Picture it as a nice day, late autumn. Zheng was in a rented 2003 Nissan Sunny. Someone in Tekapo had already noticed her bad driving and made an emergency *555 call after watching her car drift into the opposite lane.
Police were sent from Twizel to look for the car. Zheng kept driving south, oblivious. The police did not find her until it was too late.
A little over two hours after the emergency call, Zheng was about 20km north of Tarras on State Highway 8 when she struck two motorcyclists and killed them.
Grant Roberts, 43, and Dennis Pederson, 54, were in a group of 10 riding north after the Burt Munro Challenge in Invercargill. Roberts was from Timaru and Pederson from Tauranga.
Zheng's car slid on gravel on a curve. She over-corrected, crossed the centre line again and Roberts and Pederson died instantly. Roberts hit a barrier and Pederson was thrown more than 20 metres.
Zheng was a Chinese exchange student from Australia. She was convicted in the Alexandra District Court, disqualified from driving for two years and ordered to pay $10,000 for emotional harm.
At the inquest in 2014, it was revealed Zheng probably had less than one month's driving experience since getting her licence in China and had not driven in 10 months. The inquest also became an opportunity for Queenstown police to air their growing concerns about international drivers.
Senior Sergeant John Fookes said officers had noticed that the number of drivers from China hiring cars had increased significantly in recent years, as have 'the number of reported road crashes and driving complaints involving drivers from China'.
Fookes said a common feature of the complaints 'appears to be the inability of a proportion of these drivers to have proper control of their hired vehicle'.
He lamented that police were mostly powerless to stop them and wanted to see a law change to empower police to remove licences or test the competency of foreign drivers.
The inquest also heard that in some parts of China, new drivers such as Zheng are subject to a probationary period and, in some cases, do not drive on roads with speed limits above 40kmh.
Coroner Richard McElrea praised the police response as reasonable and prompt and made recommendations to rental vehicle operators. He felt they should be bound by a code of practice and that foreign drivers must have their driving competency assessed before renting a vehicle. But recommendations made by coroners are not legally binding.
So imagine being Kejia Zheng, killing two people on the second day of your holiday, and then imagine being Roberts' son Sean, fatherless at the age of 9. He launched an online petition.
'My dad, Grant Roberts was killed in an accident caused by a foreign driver,' Sean wrote. 'I would like to see a change, a test before they drive on our roads. Nobody deserves to go through what I have been through. If things don't change people will keep getting hurt.'
FROM THE ARCHIVES
* Chinese driver had limited experience
As of Thursday, the petition at change.org had more than 36,000 of the 50,000 signatures Sean is seeking.
One of the signatories is Queenstown man Nick Gregory who wrote on the petition last year that he resigned after 10 years of managing car rental companies.
He framed it as an act of conscience: 'I simply refused to feel responsible for handing over the keys to tourists who, time after time, end up killing themselves and taking out New Zealanders in the process. I have written to the Transport Minister, the President of the NZ Rental Car Association and the reply I got was simply that it would prove too costly to initiate a programme where tourists must complete and pass a written drivers' test prior to them being granted a rental car.'
Gregory wrote that 'week-in, week-out, lives are taken unnecessarily at the hands of inexperienced foreign drivers. It has to stop. I support Sean Roberts in his quest to make a change.'
That was last year but the story of Kejia Zheng seemed to contain all the issues at play in the controversy about foreign drivers, which remain unresolved and which flared up again this week after several more terrible accidents on southern roads.
There is the underprepared or incompetent foreign driver. There are the frustrated police. There is a family or community that feels it must launch a grassroots campaign to get answers. And there are the slow-moving government agencies reluctantly coming around to the problem.
There have been three reported instances this summer alone of the public taking the law into their own hands and confiscating keys from foreign drivers after observing dangerous behaviour.
But there have been some developments. This summer the police launched 'Operation Rental', which boosted patrols on South Island tourist routes.
The New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) launched its 'visiting drivers signature project' in Queenstown last year. It involved attaching basic driver education material about the speed limit, driving on the left, wearing seat belts and so on, as a tag on rental car steering wheels. After a trial, it is being rolled out nationally.
But road safety campaigners such as Dog and Lemon Guide editor Clive Matthew-Wilson are sceptical about such 'low-key strategies' as those visual aids, the Tourism Industry Association's Drive Safe website and loose arrangements between rental companies to share information.
The NZTA's own evaluation of its project showed the results were mixed. Some alarming comments appeared in the feedback from rental companies: 'One person commented that they loved the campervan but was terrified when they first drove it out of the depot. Perhaps it would be useful in this instance to provide some driving instruction first.'
Another reported that a Thai tourist hired a vehicle in Auckland without showing a Thai license as well as an international license when the legal requirement is to show both. 'The visitor persisted and they were eventually allowed to rent the vehicle.'
The evaluation showed that 'most at least occasionally observed visitors driving on the wrong side of the road' and 'most had at least sometimes observed drivers driving too fast for the road conditions'.
The project followed a survey of international tourists published in March 2014. It found that driving was the most common way for tourists to get around New Zealand, with 63 per cent driving themselves by car, 27 per cent going by bus, 18 per cent by campervan, 7 per cent by plane, 4 per cent by train and 1 per cent by bicycle. (The total exceeds 100 per cent because tourists use a variety of modes.)
Cost and value for money were given as the main reasons for driving. Some bought vehicles but 79 per cent rented with price being the main guide.
Most drove for between three and four hours per day, but the shorter the overall holiday, the longer each day's driving. Unsurprisingly, tourists from right-hand drive countries found it harder to navigate.
The survey reported that Asian drivers feel the least safe on our roads, with only 77 per cent feeling safe. Australians are the most confident, with 98 per cent feeling safe. When asked for improvements, 12 per cent of driving visitors think
we need better signage.
In another analysis of foreign drivers published last year, it was revealed that loss of control and unfamiliarity with local conditions were the leading causes of accidents. It found a 'clustering of crashes around Queenstown, Cromwell, along SH94 to Milford and SH6'.
In Otago and Southland combined, from 2009 to 2013, there were 493 injury crashes involving overseas drivers. The overseas driver was at fault or shared fault in 409 of them.
Thirty-seven per cent of crashes in Westland involved an overseas driver, compared to 25 per cent in Southland, 24 per cent in Queenstown-Lakes and 17 per cent in Central Otago.
When the numbers were analysed further, it was found that failure to keep left features much more with overseas drivers than New Zealand drivers. More than two-thirds of the crashes when overseas drivers lost control happened when the driver was turning.
Again, no surprise that this and other reports 'identified drivers from right-side driving countries to be a greater concern' than those from left-side countries such as Australia and Britain.
It is a highly emotive issue and that explains why the populist response this week has been so strong. The debate about road safety taps into deep fears, the deepest of which might be a fear of being unable to protect our children.
The week began on Saturday when 5-year-old Ruby Marris from Oamaru was killed in a head-on collision between her family's station wagon and a rental four-wheel-drive on State Highway 1 near Moeraki, Otago. A 32-year-old Chinese driver appeared in court on Monday and, like Zheng in 2012, he was granted name suppression for his own safety.
Police said the rental vehicle crossed the centre line.
Other cases followed, gaining more attention than they might have otherwise as momentum grew in the wake of Marris' death. On the same day that the driver in the Moeraki crash appeared in court, two Chinese men and an Indian man were convicted in Queenstown on charges of driving dangerously and a third Chinese tourist pleaded guilty to careless driving causing injury.
One of those cases involved a rental car crossing the centre line near Queenstown, seriously injuring two British tourists in an oncoming rental car.
Another involved a driver repeatedly crossing the centre line and overtaking on blind corners between Queenstown and Kingston. He reached a speed of 134kmh before he was eventually stopped.
His lawyer told the court that he believed overtaking was permitted anywhere there were no yellow lines, including corners. He also said he was unaware that flashing police lights meant he must stop. He was fined $1000 and disqualified for six months.
The Indian driver was in New Zealand on honeymoon and was seen overtaking a tourist bus, causing the bus and an oncoming car to take evasive action. Sixteen American tourists on the bus said it was a close call.
There are many other stories in the roll call of death and injury. A French tourist admitted to three charges of dangerous driving after a crash last month on the road between New Plymouth and Te Kuiti. Six people were injured including the driver.
Six Chinese tourists in a rental van narrowly escaped serious injury after the driver fell asleep and crossed the centre line near Lake Tekapo on Tuesday. On the same day, Temuka couple Val and Dieter Geitlinger were on the road between Winchester and Geraldine when their renovated bus was hit by a rental car driven by Asian tourists.
Stephanie Ellis of Leeston died on Monday after her car was struck by a Honda Odyssey alleged to have gone through a stop sign near Springston, south of Christchurch. Both men in the Honda Odyssey were German nationals.
A Chinese tourist died in a head-on collision with a truck in North Canterbury. A Taiwanese tourist died in a crash in Templeton, possibly after the tourist drove through a stop sign. Four Americans died in Tokoroa, two Koreans near Dunedin, one Israeli in North Canterbury and two Germans north of Auckland. That was just in February.
Clive Matthew-Wilson prepared a paper on this before the recent series of deaths and the attendant publicity.
He noted the long-term increase from 1994, when only 0.7 per cent of death or injury accidents involved tourists, to 2013, when the figure had climbed to 4.2 per cent, due to the increase in tourists driving themselves around New Zealand.
He identified six main causes, including unfamiliarity with campervans and high-speed rural roads, confusion at intersections for those who normally drive on the right side and tiredness after long flights. Two were less obvious: the time pressures faced by Asian tourists who have shorter annual holidays and different cultural attitudes to death and danger, particularly in India.
Matthew-Wilson calls for a mandatory code of road safety practice for the rental vehicle industry. It would prevent a driver turned down by one rental agency going to another. That would have stopped Dutch driver Johannes Appelman who killed three people, including two 12-year old girls, in Canterbury last year.
Appelman rented a car after a long flight, crashed it near the airport, and then rented a car from a different firm the next day. One of Matthew-Wilson's suggestions is that no drivers, including New Zealanders, should be allowed to drive a rental within 24 hours of arriving on a long flight. Driving tired is known to be as dangerous as driving drunk.
Another idea is to take a compulsory driver cognisance test before renting a vehicle.
We could also do with more multilingual and icon-based road signs, he says. It all comes down to making our rural roads safer, perhaps with rumble strips and median barriers. Some of our South Island roads are like staircases without handrails, as Matthew-Wilson puts it.
If coroner Richard McElrea's comments about Kejia Zheng were a warning that we should have heeded before now, so too might be another warning from last year. When sentencing a Chinese driver who crossed the centre line in his rental car and collided with an oncoming vehicle near Queenstown, Judge Kevin Phillips called the man's driving 'atrocious' and an illustration of why tourists must sit driving tests.
Or perhaps there is a third, less obvious way. Remember those statistics about how tourists get around New Zealand? The car beats all other modes combined.
So if everyone has a foreign driving anecdote to offer, here is mine. This one is more benign. An Englishman who lives in France was staying with a family member in Dunedin this summer. He saw a lot of the South Island, but always as a passenger.
I asked how he enjoyed his trip.
'Oh, fine,' he said, a little wearily. 'But all the driving! Don't you have trains in this country?'