Will we change after Waverley?

Six lives gone. Two other lives in tatters. Car crashes like the one north of Waverley in South Taranaki yesterday morning do not get more horrifying than this.

Quite apart from the absolute calamity this is for the individuals directly involved, the shockwaves from the crash will take in hundreds of family and friends who have suddenly lost people they loved for a lifetime.

Tragedies on the scale of this one briefly make us sit up and genuinely understand the death and destruction behind those innocuous numbers that describe our road toll.

Before the tragedy yesterday 187 people had paid the ultimate price on our roads this year. That is more than one death every day.

Now that toll stands at 193 dead. But it won’t stand there for long.

By the end of the year the toll will be more than 300 dead and there are thousands more who will pay a price in injuries that will forever change their lives.

It is likely the Waverley crash will change how some of us drive for at least a day or two.

We may decide to let ourselves understand the utterly ridiculous level of risk we put ourselves at when we get into a tonne of steel, plastic and glass and drive it at 100kmh or more.

After all, it only takes one mistake by one person for that car trip to turn into death and yet most of us are absolutely assured we will not make that mistake or have the wherewithal to avoid the mistakes of others.

The relative risk of dying on New Zealand’s roads is actually decreasing.

In 1987 there were 795 people killed on our roads and 18,728 injured. In 2016 that had dropped to 327 dead and 12,456 injured.

This trend is no comfort to those who are no longer here and should not be reason to pat ourselves on the back, but it is an indication our driving habits are improving.

But how we get it below 300 may require more than safer cars, tougher drink driving laws, better driver eduction and improved road design.

It might be time to follow the recommendations in an April report put out by the International Transport Forum, of which New Zealand was a part, to reduce the speed on rural roads that don’t have median barriers to 70kmh.

Such a change would take a significant chunk out of our annual road toll overnight.

The cost we would have to bear would mainly be changing our ideas around travel times between two points.

Journeys that used to take 60 minutes, may now take 80 or so.

Logically you’d be a mug to turn down the opportunity to pay a handful of minutes in increased travel time to significantly raise your odds of surviving a car journey. But it seems mugs are what we are.

A poll on the April story about the report to reduce the limit was voted on by 19,000 people.

More than 80 per cent said no thanks to lowering the speed limit below 100kmh.