Rising toll has many factors
‘‘I don’t understand why this and the reasons for it continue to be debated. It’s pretty obvious to anyone who has driven overseas, Europe, America, Australia, and most other developed countries, that New Zealand drivers are simply appalling drivers. They lack skill, are aggressive, impatient, arrogant, egotistical, and just plain stupid.’’
That anonymous comment was placed, no-one will be surprised to learn, on a story about driver attitudes and New Zealand’s ‘‘horror’’ road toll of 379 last year, up 49.8 per cent up on the low point since records began, of 253, in 2013.
And while the poster may have a point about the standard of our driving, it’s worth pondering whether one factor that actually underpins the problem is that in the age of social media, where opinions are fired into the public domain instantly, everyone is an expert, everyone is seeking immediate validation of their own hot take on the problem, and too few people are listening to other perspectives.
Not that it would be problematic for the country at large if everyone held the opinion that our driving is simply not good enough. Hopefully that would prompt us all to indulge in some introspection about our own performance behind the wheel, and we’d see a resultant drop. Plainly that’s not the case, though.
Nor, obviously, is it the case that every fatal crash is down to flawed road design, or any other single reason. Yet parts of the social media debate around road safety - the response to last week’s crash south of Timaru, which claimed the life of a Waimate woman, has been instructive seem to be an exercise in blindly defending entrenched positions, rather than actually trying to find a solution.
It’s quite clear there are several factors in our road toll’s alarming rise since 2013, including, but not limited to: an increased number of vehicles on our roads; a significant drop in road police, with more than 100 vacancies in this area, which must, of necessity, reduce the amount of pre-emptive road policing that can be undertaken; driver error; generally poor driving standards; driver distraction, including mobile phones; high speeds; failure to drive according to conditions; driver impairment; poor road design; tourist drivers, allied to inadequate regulation around the requirements for driving here; a rising number of motorbike-related fatals, which has prompted calls for more regulation around these.
A greater degree of attention on each of these factors would plainly contribute in some way to helping to bring down the road toll, but none in its own right would solve the whole problem. An appreciation of the fact that the rising toll is by no means a single factor issue, and that each of us who takes to the road has a role to play in bringing it down, would surely help, though. In the end, open-mindedness has to trump bloody-mindedness on this.