Genter’s plan to halt fatalities begins today

"I firmly believe the Government has a responsibility and a capacity to make the road and transport system safer." Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter

ANALYSIS: The new Government has plans to improve road safety, including funding local road safety projects, to bring down the road toll.

Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter has called police, the New Zealand Transport Agency and the Ministry of Transport to Wellington for a crisis meeting today.

She wants to create a long-term plan to make our roads safer but with this year’s toll already at 330, something needs to be done immediately.

Genter said in the first instance they would be doing a stocktake, and identifying areas where the most impact can be made in a short amount of time.

Why is the road toll so high?

The road toll has been tracking up in recent years, thanks in large part to more cars on the roads.

According to an annual Massey University study, there were 4 million cars in 2016; just 10 years ago, there were 3.36m.

From 2011 to 2016, the number of kilometres driven on our roads increased 13 per cent.

AA spokesman Dylan Thomsen said this was likely to be a factor, but that did not entirely account for the increase.

Genter said as well as the economic factors, the Government’s choices around where it spent its transport money had affected the road toll.

Big roading investments had been the priority. Local government, which usually funded safety upgrades and roading projects had also been spending up large on infrastructure projects, leaving little for upgrading and maintaining dangerous stretches of road.

Thomsen said that since 1987 (when 795 people died), our road toll was consistently falling until it reached a record low of 253 in 2013.

Since then, New Zealand had four straight years of more people dying in crashes and no-one had a clear answer for why.

One of the most disturbing changes was a jump in the number of people dying who weren’t wearing a seatbelt. New Zealand used to have about 50 unrestrained people dying a year but last year that jumped to 100.

Why did it track down in previous years?

The global financial crisis, coupled with rising oil prices (which mean higher petrol prices), led to people using their cars less frequently.

Fewer private vehicle users on the road – and fewer big trucks carting freight – generally meant fewer accidents. And cars were becoming safer.

Then things changed. The economy recovered, more cars were on the roads, businesses needed more goods moved around the country, population continued to increase, and the arrow started tracking upwards.

How will the Government fix this?

Genter said her ‘‘No 1 priority’’ in the transport portfolio was to bring down the road toll.

She said there were some high value, dangerous roads that would be inexpensive to fix. There was also the option of introducing more restricted speed zones.

She wanted a multi-pronged approach, which included more passenger services, better public transport (to take cars off the roads), and more rail and water freight (to take trucks off the roads).

It also included education campaigns, addressing this like speeding, seatbelts, and driving while under the influence.

Thomsen said there was no silver bullet. ‘‘Road safety is a combination of a number of factors and we need to deal with all of them by improving roads that have high crash rates, getting more people into safer vehicles and lifting the standard of driving behaviour.’’

However, AA campaigned for the Government to make four key changes:

❚ Make people not wearing seatbelts an urgent priority for authorities.

❚ Lift New Zealand’s 2-star regional roads to at least 3-star safety standard through adding barriers, widening shoulders and altering dangerous intersections.

❚ Ensure at least 5000 high-risk drink drivers a year have alcohol interlocks (like an in-car breathalyser) installed in their vehicles.

❚ Give police the ability to do saliva tests for suspected drugged drivers

Where will the money come from?

Generally, local government funded improvements on roads in their authority area, and other transport projects, while central government dealt with the state highway network, national services like policing and advertising, and helped fund regional projects.

All up, New Zealand invests about $4b a year through the National Land Transport Programme. Local government was responsible for about $800m of this. Central government invested about $3b from the National Land Transport Fund (NLTF).

NLTF revenue comes from fuel excise duty, road-user charges, and motor vehicle registration and licensing fees. Local government relied on rates to fund local transport costs.

Genter said this was not a sustainable method of raising revenue for long-term-infrastructure, especially in Auckland.