The roads to ruing
The delusion persists that illegal cellphone use isn't such a big deal.
So are we ready to accept that 253 dead people in a single year can now be filed under the heading Good Old Days?
Hopefully not. That was the 2013 road toll, chilling in itself, but also the end of a sustained, promising trend of reducing carnage.
That trend has ended. The toll’s been tracking up, sharply for the first two years, then holding, and now boom.
This year’s already topped 290 and road policing national manager Superintendent Steve Greally finds himself acknowledging that if we can finish the year under 350, ‘‘I would take that as some sort of victory’’.
It would be trite, if not fatuous, to scold him for a lack of ambition. For one thing, road safety is not a simple function of how well the police do their job.
Greally spoke as one still tasting the ashes of the aspirations held at the start of the year. He said police were doing all they legally could to get the toll down and he wasn’t shy about highlighting problems that went beyond the poor judgment shown by drivers, consequential though these undeniably were.
Much as Greally hammered the need for people to drive to the road conditions, rather than thinking themselves safe if they merely default to the limit, he also warned that some of those limits, especially on rural roads, were set too high.
The number of cars out there is rising dramatically. Car safety features are also increasing, but the same goes for the number of potential distractions inside the modern car.
The delusion persists that illegal cellphone use isn’t such a big deal if you have your wits about you.
Evidence aplenty is telling us that if you do this you’re liable to have your wits about you all right. Or at least the remnants of them, spread across the windscreen or asphalt.
The NZ Initiative think-tank has recently reported on road safety spending and prioritisation. Areas in which the goal is to get actually fewer bangs for your buck.
One of its findings was a challenge to the prioritisation of designated Roads of National Significance, which report author Sam Warburton has argued are relatively lightly travelled compared to the cost of building them.
In essence, he raises the challenge that if safety were a primary objective, shouldn’t other, riskier blackspots and stretches of road be prioritised higher? And if other priorities like travel times are taking precedence, then should they be? Excellent questions.