Road toll back on steady rise

The official Easter weekend road toll is always significant in the battle for safety on our roads, but this year what went before seems more significant. Yesterday morning, a day out from the end of the toll period, the Easter toll already stood at four, twice that of 2017, with police urging holidaymakers heading home to be patient and watch following distances.

The dead included two children, both correctly restrained, who died in a Good Friday crash on the North Island’s Desert Road. That horrific collision will resonate for some time, but the wider road toll picture should concern authorities deeply now.

According to the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) website, on March 29, the road toll for the year was 100, 14 higher than at the same time in 2017. Four fatalities on Friday and Saturday took the toll to the end of March to 104.

Last year was a terrible year on our roads, the toll of 380 the highest in eight years, and 50 per cent up on the 253 deaths recorded just four years earlier.

That 2013 toll was the lowest since 1950, but sobering annual numbers since read 293, 319, 327,

380. Based on the first quarter of

2018, we are on track for the first

400-plus toll since the 421 in 2007. After the high of a six-decade low, there has been precious little encouragement for those focused on road safety.

This year’s toll contains some interesting features:

19 motorcycle riders and two pillion passengers had died by March 29, against seven in the same period in

2017.

In Canterbury, where the toll in the first quarter of

2014 was three, 20 people had died before Easter, with Northland up from four to 15 in the same period.

As always, there will be a range of contributing factors: speed, alcohol, distraction, driver error in numerous guises. The specific short-term ones at play in relation to those spikes bear investigation.

But long-term factors must be looked at too, including the number of vehicles, quality of roads, police presence on roads. In the 10 years to 2016, the number of deaths per 10,000 vehicles fell from 1.3 in 2007 to 0.8 in 2013, then sat at 0.9 from 2014-2016, though the toll increased, suggesting increasing vehicle numbers.

Then again, with thousands of vehicles heading to Dunedin for the weekend’s Ed Sheeran concerts, there had not been an Easter South Island fatality by yesterday morning. Perhaps vehicle volumes kept speeds down, police and NZTA messages got through, and an increased police presence helped curb drivers’ impatience.

What of truck volumes? Three of four deaths on Friday and Saturday were in crashes involving trucks.

So what is to be done? Our road toll cannot be left to rise to heights we thought were behind us, and all factors must be looked at, including politically sensitive ones like truck sizes and volumes, and roading.

There must be the political will to fully back the agencies charged with improving our road safety, otherwise 400 will be just the first stop on a retrospective tour of road-toll milestones.

One death on our roads is still one too many, after all.

Our road toll cannot be left to rise to heights we thought were behind us.