We know how to cut the road toll. So why don't we?

Saturday, 6 June 2026

For decades, researchers and engineers have understood how to prevent death and serious injury on roads. Yet as New Zealand’s road toll remains stubbornly high, the country is moving away from some of the policies that made other nations safer, as a public-health issue becomes a political and cultural battle. CHARLIE MITCHELL reports. Read more from The Press investigative series Crash Nation here.

Janet Meikle was, by every account, a careful driver.

She and her husband John had spent the afternoon in Timaru. She took the wheel of their 8-horsepower De Dion Bouton on the way home, as she almost always did. John was a former Cobb & Co driver, but Janet was better.

The road to their farm near Pleasant Point ran down a steep hill. As the car descended, it drifted toward the upper bank. Janet corrected, a fraction too hard. The De Dion scraped along a fence, tipped, and overturned into a freshly ploughed paddock. John was thrown clear with a broken thigh. Janet was pinned beneath the car, its weight on her chest.

“Jack, I am dying,” she told him. He dragged himself to the house and called for the maid. By then, his wife was already dead.

It was September 8, 1906. Meikle, a 36-year-old mother, was the first person in New Zealand killed in a car crash.

About 42,000 have followed her.

More than a century later, we tend to experience the road toll as weather: a bad year, a good year, a grim long weekend. But road trauma does not reset on January 1. It accumulates.

It also rarely ends at the crash site. A death on the road detonates outward, through families, workplaces, schools and towns. Research into sudden bereavement suggests one unexpected death can directly affect dozens of people, sometimes more than a hundred, with measurable increases in depression, anxiety, PTSD and substance abuse in those left behind.

They do not appear in crash statistics, but they are part of the cost all the same.

Yet none of this sits beyond human control. Countries with road tolls once similar to New Zealand’s have shown that deaths and serious injuries can be driven sharply downward.

When countries stopped accepting road deaths

For most of the 20th century, road deaths were treated as tragic but inevitable. Crashes were understood as failures of individual behaviour — drunk drivers, reckless overtaking, inattentive pedestrians — and governments responded accordingly, with campaigns and enforcement aimed at fixing the driver.

The shift began in Sweden. In the mid-1990s, a Swedish politician asked the country's top transport official a simple question: How many road deaths should Sweden be willing to accept? The official paused. Zero.

The exchange became the foundation of Vision Zero, a philosophy that would reshape transport policy across much of Europe.

Vision Zero does not assume crashes can be eliminated — people will always be distracted, impatient, tired or reckless. Its claim is narrower: that ordinary human error should not routinely maim and kill people. Human nature cannot be redesigned, but the system around it can.

Under Vision Zero, responsibility no longer rests primarily with the person behind the wheel. It is shared with the people who design the roads, approve the vehicles, set the speed limits and regulate the system as a whole. The philosophy draws heavily from biomechanics: human bodies tolerate only limited physical force before injury becomes fatal. A pedestrian struck at 30kph will usually survive. At 50, most will not. A head-on crash at 80 is far more survivable than one at 100. A safe road, the argument goes, is one built around those facts rather than against them.

The principles reshaped Swedish roads. Highways were divided by median barriers. Intersections became roundabouts. Urban speed limits came down. Speed cameras multiplied and fines rose. None of it was politically easy. Speed enforcement in particular drew sustained backlash.

Yet the larger premise — that road deaths were preventable rather than inevitable — survived.

When Sweden adopted Vision Zero in 1997, its road toll was almost identical to New Zealand's: 541 deaths to our 540. For a time the two countries tracked each other closely. Then they diverged.

Since 2009, New Zealand's roads have killed 1251 more people than Sweden's.

Sweden is not an outlier. Norway adopted Vision Zero principles in 2001, when it recorded 310 road deaths against New Zealand’s 405. Its toll has fallen sharply ever since. Last year, the Norwegian Government described 2025 as “a dark year for road safety” because it had recorded 112 deaths. That is fewer than half the lowest annual figure New Zealand has ever achieved, a number this country typically reaches over four months.

Similar trajectories have unfolded in Lithuania, in parts of Australia, in South Korea, and in New York. Their progress is rarely linear; annual figures fluctuate. But the long-term direction across the developed world has been unmistakable: countries that stopped accepting road deaths have made them rarer.

New Zealand’s attempt

As much of the developed world moved in one direction, New Zealand’s progress was less straightforward.

New Zealand formally adopted Safe System principles in 2010, accepting the central idea that people would always make mistakes and roads should be designed around predictable human failure rather than ideal behaviour.

Early signs were encouraging. Road deaths fell to a record low of 253 in 2013, and for a time it seemed possible New Zealand might follow northern Europe.

Instead, the trend reversed through the second half of the decade, as comparable countries kept driving their tolls down, ours climbed. By 2018 the figure had reached 378 — the worst year in nearly a decade.

No single cause explained the rise. Researchers pointed to more alcohol-related crashes, more crashes involving learner drivers, and signs that enforcement had quietly slackened.

The Government's answer was Road to Zero, launched in 2019 and rolled out the following year. Unlike earlier strategies, it embraced the Vision Zero premise outright: that road deaths should be treated as preventable failures of the system, not managed downward as a cost of doing business.

Its headline target, a 40% reduction in deaths and serious injuries by 2030, had already been achieved in some countries. In raw numbers it amounted to 227 deaths in 2030, only marginally lower than the record set in 2013.

On paper, the strategy looked straightforward. In practice, it collided with a difficult political reality.

Road to Zero was a broad package, encompassing infrastructure upgrades, enforcement, and speed management. The public debate collapsed into one issue: speed limits.

Decades of evidence show that lower average speeds produce disproportionately large reductions in death and serious injury. It is physics, not politics. Engineering can make high-speed crashes more survivable, particularly through median barriers, but across New Zealand’s sprawling rural network those upgrades are expensive. Reducing speed is cheap.

The trade-off is asymmetric. The inconvenience of driving slower is immediate and universal: being late to work, getting home a few minutes later. The life saved is statistical and invisible; it is a crash that does not happen, to people the driver will never meet. Asking people to trade their own time for strangers can feel like a pointless sacrifice, even when the maths are overwhelming.

Road to Zero also arrived at the wrong political moment. Introduced shortly before the pandemic, it entered a political climate becoming distrustful of expertise and worn out by collective sacrifice. Lower speed limits became a vessel for those anxieties because, unlike most policy, they were experienced constantly and personally.

The backlash, on social media and then in mainstream politics, was fierce and sustained. By 2024, Road to Zero was effectively dead.

A test of the theory

One stretch of road offers a useful test of these competing ideas.

State Highway 6 between Blenheim and Nelson cuts through hills and long bends, a rural highway with no median barrier separating traffic moving in opposite directions.

It is precisely the sort of road Vision Zero principles flag for a lower speed limit — too expensive to engineer to a higher standard, but too dangerous to leave alone.

In December 2020, under Road to Zero, the limit was reduced from 100kph to 90kph.

Officials later examined 11 state highway sections where speed limits had changed: nine reduced, two raised. The findings, when they arrived, were striking.

On SH6, deaths and serious-injury crashes fell by 84%. Every road with a lower speed limit recorded fewer serious crashes.

Both roads where limits increased recorded more.

The economic numbers were equally clear. Lower speed limits meant longer journeys, and the additional travel time carried a real cost. But on every road in the study, the savings from fewer crashes outweighed it, typically by a wide margin.

On SH6, the average trip lengthened from 75 minutes to 79 minutes, an economic cost of $5.8 million. The drop in serious crashes, however, came with a benefit of $25m. The benefit-to-cost ratio was positive on every road with a lower limit.

The report was completed in March 2024, as the new Government was undertaking work on its policy to increase speed limits. It is not referenced in any available Cabinet documentation and was only released within a package of other documents uploaded to the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) website.

Under the Government’s new policy, roads like those in the study would have their speed limits automatically reversed unless the public supported keeping them.

Consultation on SH6 found about two-thirds of submitters supported a higher limit. The speed limit was reversed.

The politics of inconvenience

A typical school zone is 300 metres long. At 50kph, a driver crosses it in 22 seconds. At 30kph, it takes 36 seconds.

The difference is 14 seconds, about the length of five standard breaths. Fourteen seconds doesn’t sound like much. Across every driver passing every school in the country, it starts to add up.

But that’s only part of the ledger. A pedestrian struck at 50kph is at least four times more likely to be seriously injured or killed than one struck at 30kph. The chance of dying rises from roughly one in 20 to one in three.

The country has, in fact, already put a number on the other side of that equation.

Treasury and Ministry of Transport guidance values a single road death at $15.6m — the Value of a Statistical Life (VOSL), derived from surveys asking thousands of New Zealanders what they would personally pay through taxation to prevent one fatality on the road. By that measure, the time savings begin to look very small beside the cost of a death.

The previous Government, under Road to Zero, had introduced permanent 30km/h limits outside schools on exactly this calculus. Under a Vision Zero approach, the two figures would not be traded against each other at all.

The current Government reversed the policy. Schools must now apply the lower limit only at drop-off and pick-up; outside those windows, the higher limit returns.

Officials warned the change could mean more injuries and deaths. They also conceded that the economic benefits used to justify it could not be quantified.

Before the election, National framed Road to Zero as revealing an “anti-car ideology” slowing down New Zealanders “under the guise of safety”.

Now in government, it has replaced Road to Zero with a shorter strategy placing greater emphasis on economic considerations alongside safety.

Transport Minister Chris Bishop says the Government “remains committed” to the Safe System approach and to the goal of designing a network in which ordinary mistakes do not result in death or serious injury. “Our focus is on targeting the most significant contributors to crashes, including drugs and alcohol, alongside safer roads, safer vehicles and safer driver behaviour,” he says.

On the speed limit reversals, he says Cabinet “considered a range of advice, including impacts on travel times and economic productivity, alongside safety considerations”.

Critics argue this reverses the logic underpinning Vision Zero. Professor Simon Kingham, until recently the chief science adviser to the Ministry of Transport, says it is “devoid of any logic”.

“The time savings you get are minimal,” he says. “It’s the time it takes us to fiddle around with our keys and open the front door, or to doomscroll a bit longer. Ministers talk about saving you time as though it’s about being productive. But it’s not. It's just meaningless.”

Kingham left his advisory role in 2024, sceptical that evidence was still being valued in transport decisions. He says he is not aware of any other country that has adopted Vision Zero and then walked away from it.

He is not alone in saying so. Academics and international road-safety organisations also warned the changes would lead to more deaths and serious injuries.

Professor Michael Keall, an injury epidemiologist at the University of Otago, argues the larger issue is not speed limits alone but where money is being spent.

He points to the Roads of National Significance programme, a small number of expensive new motorway projects swallowing the bulk of the transport budget.

“They are very, very expensive roads,” he says.

“Even the official figures show the benefit-to-cost ratio is normally very poor. A much better approach would have been to look at improving the safety of the whole network.”

One of the most effective interventions on rural roads is the median barrier. According to NZTA data, just 18.2km of new median barrier has been installed across the country in 2025 and the first months of 2026. The state highway network is roughly 11,000km long.

What troubles Keall most is not any single decision, but the trajectory.

“We don’t want road safety becoming a politicised issue,” he says. ”That will reduce public buy-in over time. We want to move in a consistent direction and have consistent policies over time. It’s really unfortunate that it has become a political issue.“

The Government no longer operates under a specific target for reducing deaths and serious injuries, as it did under Road to Zero. An NZTA spokesperson confirmed as much to The Press, saying the agency “wants to continue to see a reduction in these figures”.

On the balance of safety investments, NZTA pointed to the expected safety benefits of Roads of National Significance. Since Transmission Gully opened north of Wellington in 2022, no deaths have been recorded on the route, despite more than 150 vehicles striking the central barrier. Serious-injury rates on the new road are about a third of those on the state highway it replaced.

The figures are not in dispute. New, well-engineered highways with median barriers are significantly safer than the rural roads they replace, which is what Vision Zero principles predict. The disagreement is about where the safety dollar goes furthest.

In countries that have sharply reduced road deaths, safety operates as a constraint: productivity and convenience work around it. In New Zealand it increasingly sits alongside competing priorities rather than ahead of them.

It has happened with public support. Consultations on speed limit reversals have consistently favoured higher limits, and the government that promised them was elected on a platform that treated lower speed limits as an economic burden rather than a safety intervention.

What comes after the crash

Sarah Dean reads the comment sections more in puzzlement than anger.

For 15 years she has run the National Road Trauma Centre, a charity that walks people through the long aftermath of a crash. The work grew out of her own experience. As a young driver she spun off an icy road and woke in a daze, covered in glass, taking inventory of her limbs.

She says a crash is an intensely private experience that happens in public.

“Even if you're in the vehicle with someone, the journey to the hospital is alone,” she says.

“You’re left to deal with your thoughts and feelings. And the question is always: what are the injuries? What are they?”

She has observed the discourse around road safety become hardened since the pandemic. She finds herself reading online comments with curiosity, wondering what drives the venom towards road safety measures.

“The conversations are increasingly ideological, politicised, emotionally charged,” she says. “They can be shaped by strongly held viewpoints, which makes constructive discussion very difficult.”

Last month that anger spilled beyond the comment sections. Police investigated deliberate damage to a new point-to-point speed camera on State Highway 1 between Allanton and Waihola, south of Dunedin. The camera had not yet begun operating.

Since 2000, the stretch of road it was installed to monitor has recorded more than 450 crashes, 15 deaths and nearly 100 serious injuries. Surveys conducted before the installation found one in five drivers exceeding the speed limit.

In a Facebook group devoted to tracking speed cameras, commenters celebrated the vandalism. Earlier posts about the same camera had openly invited suggestions for how to destroy it. Just weeks later, a person was killed in a fatal crash just outside of Allanton.

What the celebrants rarely picture, Dean says, is what comes after the crash the camera might have prevented — the ambulance ride, the surgeries, the months of rehabilitation, the pain that does not go, the marriages that do not survive it, the parents who never return to work.

“Not many people think about the person who's waking up in the middle of the night in pain,” she says.

“Road safety is about harm reduction. People don't stop and think about what that means.”

What road safety requests of people is unusual. It asks them to picture the crash that never happens, to people they do not know. The point of Vision Zero was never that people stop making mistakes. It was that ordinary mistakes — driving while tired, overtaking at the wrong place, correcting a fraction too hard — no longer carry a death sentence.