Road toll back on steady climb
Road involving two cars and two truck-and-trailer units.
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 toll for the year was exactly 100, 14 up on the same period in 2017. Four fatalities on Friday and Saturday took the toll to the end of March to 104, after the second of those children died on Sunday afternoon.
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 has 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 on our roads, the quality of those roads, and the police presence on those 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. They will have increased further.
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.