Closed borders show we can't just blame tourist drivers for our road death toll

Friday, 30 October 2020

Labour weekend holiday traffic pictured near Fairlie.

With our borders closed to tourists, many people might expect to see a dip in the numbers dying on our roads.

Crashes involving overseas drivers often make the headlines. Last year, a road safety review sparked a call for foreign driver ban, while concern was raised around overseas drivers flunking a driving theory test.

Traffic pictured backed up on SH8 following a fatal crash near Lake Tekapo on Saturday.

But over the course of this Labour Day long weekend, eight people died, the highest road toll for the holiday in nearly a decade. In 2019, just one person died during Labour Weekend.

It's too early to guess at exactly what caused those tragedies. But police say, in general, that the factors most often involved in deaths and serious injury on the road remain the same: Driving too fast for the conditions or at unsafe speeds, driving while tired, or under the influence of alcohol or drugs, driving distracted such as using a cellphone, or not wearing seatbelts.

* Crashes make for 'deeply saddening' Labour weekend

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* Labour Day: Police urge for caution on roads as long weekend death toll climbs to six

Police on scene at the intersection of SH8 and Godley Peaks Rd near Lake Tekapo following a crash on Saturday.

* Road toll increases to the worst it has been in 10 years

A motorcyclist was seriously injured and taken to Taranaki Base Hospital to recover following a crash on Monday.

Before Covid-19's impact, visiting drivers only made up a very small proportion of fatal and serious crashes on New Zealand roads, a police spokesperson said. “And we know that visiting drivers crash for the same reasons as local drivers.”

Overseas drivers were involved in just over 6 per cent of fatal and injury crashes in New Zealand, according to MOT data from 2012-2016.

The provisional number of road deaths for 2019, as recorded by the Ministry of Transport, was 352. So far for 2020 (January 1– October 29), the number is 262.

In 2018, the AA research foundation looked at factors involved in fatal and serious-injury crashes. The study showed that about half of fatal crashes involved what it called “extreme behaviour” such as drunk diving and high-level speeding.

A motorcyclist died in hospital following a crash on the Desert Road on Saturday. (File photo)

The other half were considered as generally compliant drivers making mistakes, such as someone driving through a give way junction.

“I think what tends to happen is that the extreme crashes, just by their nature – the crashes that involve things that are more out of the ordinary – tend to be the ones that get more reporting in the media,” AA road safety spokesman Dylan Thomsen said.

As a result, people don’t tend to hear as much about the crashes that involve more “ordinary” drivers, whose mistakes can still lead to severe crashes and fatalities, he said.

“I think that’s the situation, or has been, with the overseas drivers. They’ve just tended to stand out more in people's minds because of the fact that they’ve been more likely to potentially feature in the media and things like that.

The scene of a three-vehicle crash at Archers Bridge in the Weka Pass in North Canterbury which occurred at 12.10pm on Friday 23.

“As the official stats show that actually the vast majority of crashes involve New Zealand drivers and a whole bunch of other factors.”

Thomsen said Labour Weekend this year was a “really bad weekend” with some “horrific tragedies”.

Back in April, we had a “historically low number” of just 9 deaths on our roads which was linked to the country’s level 4 Covid-19 lockdown. At Easter, we had no deaths on our roads for the first time since 2012.

But “if you took April out of the equation, we would be on track to have had more road deaths this year than the previous year. So 2020 has not been a good year by any stretch.”

The Ministry of Transport’s acting manager of mobility and safety Helen White said Labour Weekend’s figures were “disheartening”, and that their thoughts were with the families who had lost loved ones.

“Deaths and serious injuries should not be inevitable when travelling in New Zealand,” she said.

Is there a solution? Thomsen said there was no single issue on our roads. Instead, there were a combination of different things that we need to improve to make real differences.

That includes people looking at their own driving instead of blaming others, he said.

“Absolutely, we need to be looking at our own driving – all of us. Changing attitudes and behaviour is not an easy thing to do, it's difficult stuff.

'But all of us, every single person out on the road, actually is capable of being a better driver and recognising that there are certain things that they do that they could do better, or they could stop doing.”

He said road safety also was about a safe system approach – where we needed all parts of the system working well, including our physical roads, the vehicles we drive, driver behaviour, and road speeds. “It's a big, interconnected puzzle.”

White said that while actions to improve people’s road skills and behaviour and to deter risk-taking behaviour were still critical to our success, this alone would not fix the problem.

She said they were also focusing on improving our road network, tackling unsafe speeds and lifting the safety of our vehicle fleet.

Long-time road safety campaigner Clive Matthew-Wilson, of car review website Dog and Lemon, has suggested a number of tough measures to crack down drivers.

These included giving police the power to permanently seize cellphones used by the drivers of moving vehicles, as well as the power to impound vehicles where the occupants aren't wearing seatbelts. He also said there needed to be a much tougher testing regime for motorcycles.

The Labour weekend toll

The first person to die on New Zealand’s roads over the Labour long weekend was a motorcyclist on State Highway 2 in Timberlea, Upper Hutt.

A second person died in a crash on Whatatutu Rd, Te Karaka, near Gisborne, in the early hours of Saturday morning.

A third death occurred after a two-car crash on State Highway 8 near Tekapo on Saturday morning. Three other people were injured in the crash.

A pedestrian died in a crash on State Highway 3, in Westmere, Whanganui, on Saturday afternoon.

And a fifth person died when a car rolled in Tikitiki, north of Gisborne.

A sixth person died in a car crash in Tokomaru, Horowhenua on Sunday evening.

The death toll rose to seven on Tuesday, after policed confirmed a woman died following a mountain biking accident on Luck at Last Road, Maungatautari.

On Thursday, the death toll rose to eight following the death of a motorcyclist in Hamilton Hospital. The crash occurred around 10.40am on Saturday on the Desert Road.