Editorial: Road toll rising again after three decades of improvements

Monday, 9 October 2017

Fire service and police at the scene of a car accident in Otara where the car is wrapped around a tree on a lawn.

EDITORIAL: After three decades of improvement, New Zealand's road death toll is rising again. This year will be the fifth in a row to see more people killed in motor vehicle crashes.

As of yesterday, 293 people had died on the roads this year, compared with 251 at the same time last year. Nine people died on the roads just between Friday and Monday morning.

A damaged car after an accident on the Appleby Highway near Nelson.

Police say they will consider it a 'victory' if the road death toll comes in under 350 at the end of the year.

That would compare with 328 in 2016, 319 in 2015, 293 in 2014 and just 253 in 2013.

* [Sixty more deaths predicted on NZ roads in already-deadly year

*](https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/97674466/sixty-more-deaths-predicted-on-nz-roads-in-alreadydeadly-year) New Zealand's road toll on track for highest total in years

* Our hidden road toll: 'It stays with you all your career and all your life'

* Dangers of the New Zealand road**

Through the early part of this decade, the prospect of permanently reducing the toll below 300 looked achievable. The 2013 toll was the lowest since 1950, when New Zealand had two-fifths the population and about one-eighth the number of vehicles.

Road deaths had been generally trending down since the late 1980s, when they averaged over 750.

But, of course, none of this was good news – just less bad news. Road deaths are so commonplace that we consider them normal. News reports on the number killed are a staple of our holiday weekends and summer vacations.

Unless we are directly affected by road accidents, or know someone who is, we hardly give them a second thought. Yet the impact on the bereaved, the injured, the emergency and health services, and the traumatised first people on the scene is enormous.

Our complacency at the carnage in our midst is at odds with our sober reflection on, for example, the way we venerate our war dead. Yet it is easy to reach for wartime terminology. Road policing national manager Superintendent Steve Greally describes our roads and highways as a 'battle zone'.

Arguably, it's worse than that. If we were bringing home 360 flag-draped coffins a year from the world's trouble spots, it would be a cause of deep national anguish. But we hardly stop to consider that, since 1980, more New Zealanders have died on our roads than were killed in the entirety of World War I.

So why are we now losing a campaign which we thought we were winning? Why, after so many years of sustained decline, are the death rates going up again?

It is hard to know precisely, because there are so many variables. It's not a simple case of population growth – the per capita death rate is also on the upswing.

Police believe that unrealistically high speed limits on minor roads might be a factor, or the flouting of the ban on using phones when driving. American and British studies suggest that one in four crashes involve someone using a phone, and it is unlikely to be any different here.

Mobile phones are both a blessing and a curse in the aseptic reckoning of road safety statistics. They save lives, because emergency services are called more quickly to the scene, and they cause deaths when people flout the law.

Progress in curbing road deaths seems to involve societal change – for instance in public attitudes towards seatbelt-wearing and against drink-driving.

Now it is time for society to condemn people who try to use their phones while driving. It would certainly be a good place to start.