Road toll a race to the bitter end

Three hundred and seventy-five times this year police have made the dreaded door knock marking another New Zealander dead on the road.

There is a glimmer of light in the darkness.

If we can keep road deaths to two or fewer today, we will be doing better than 2017.

There were 378 road deaths in 2017, the deadliest year on our roads since 2009.

Ministry of Transport figures at 7am yesterday had 375 deaths on New Zealand roads so far in 2018.

Stuff recently took a look at what could be done to reduce New Zealand’s road toll, which steadily dropped in the years to 2013 before rising sharply again.

Experts believed that making the system safer was the key, rather than trying to influence or improve driver behaviour – though that of course helps.

Dr David Logan, a senior research fellow at Australia’s Monash University accident research centre, reckons we can only ever expect a certain level of safe driving.

‘‘There is always going to be a cohort of people that you have little or no effect on,’’ he said.

‘‘But you can probably influence 80-90 per cent. So if you can have a good influence on them, you just have to deal with the 10-20 per cent in other ways.’’

Changing driver behaviour was almost a ‘‘supporting initiative’’, Logan said.

‘‘You try to build a road system that prevents people being killed or seriously injured, almost regardless of the behaviour they display.

‘‘If you can build a system like that, it’s genuinely a safe system but we can’t get all the way there, so that’s why we need to look at other things.’’

Clive Matthew-Wilson, editor of car review website Dog and Lemon, said multiple studies had shown that asking people to drive safely was ‘‘an expensive waste of time’’.

The most recent deaths on New Zealand’s roads involved a man driving into a river at a campground in Blenheim early on Saturday morning.

A 25-year-old man was killed after being hit by a car allegedly driven the wrong way on State Highway 1 out of Wellington near Johnsonville on Saturday.

‘‘There is always going to be a cohort of [drivers] that you have little or no effect on.’’ Dr David Logan, Monash University accident research centre