Blaming foreign drivers for crashes ‘misdirected’
With another summer tourist driving season on the horizon, we certainly don’t need an encore performance of the hysterics, histrionics and hyperbole trashing overseas drivers as unguided Kiwi killing machines.
The wild-eyed feeding frenzy about foreigners in rental cars billowed like algal bloom 12 months ago, while seemingly excusing the glaring imperfections of Kiwi drivers.
With one of the most shameful road crash records in the developed world, you only have to glance at the diabolical local report card from the past fortnight’s police crackdown on distracted driver behaviour.
Canterbury road policing team Senior Sergeant Scott Richardson has described the magnitude of locals going rogue as a ‘‘bloodbath’’.
In Christchurch’s Riccarton Rd alone, hundreds of motorists were sprung for cellphone use offences. Twenty demerits and an $80 fine is not a deterrent.
It’s barely befits being called a penalty. It’s a trumped up parking fine which needs a serious reboot to ram the message home.
Confiscate the phones and double the demerits.
But with the start of the peak tourist season fast approaching, are we about to see a fresh burst of whipped-up demands for tourists to be ordered to sit a driving test, or rabid, mouth-foaming Mainlanders ripping out the keys from rental cars?
The latest official crash data clearly underscores just how absurdly over-hyped the foreign driver threat really is.
The NZ Transport Agency’s southern regional director, Jim Harland, has just unveiled the latest statistics, with an appeal to lay off blaming overseas drivers for the carnage on our roads.
Flying in the face of the whipped-up public perception, the number of crashes resulting in injury or fatality involving a foreigner driver has actually dipped in the past 10 years. In 2004, there were 597 such crashes, in 2014 there were 564.
The downward trend is all the more surprising, considering there has been a 25 per cent increase in annual tourist numbers, over the corresponding period.
Three million overseas visitors have tripped through New Zealand in the past 12 months.
As a per centage of all road users involved in a crash resulting in injury or fatality, overseas drivers account for 5.7 per cent.
The overheated public rhetoric would also have you believe that licence holders with Chinesesounding surnames are our biggest foreign crashers.
But 2014’s crash data spells out that Australians are by far the most prolific contributor to the crash stats, followed by Germans and British tourists.
Like so many aspects to this foreign-driver fervour, pointing the finger of blame at right-hand driving nationalities appears to be waywardly misdirected.