Call to fix road safety mindset
New Zealand needs a major shift in its collective attitude towards road safety if the country is to curb its soaring road toll, the Automobile Association says.
On the last day of the year, the toll for 2017 stood at 379, the worst since 2009 when 384 people died.
The latest fatal accident occurred yesterday, when a man was killed in a crash in the Tasman district, bringing the Christmas road toll to nine.
The Government recently announced it would invest $22.5 million in low-cost road safety measures over the summer months, such as installing median barriers, signs and rumble strips.
AA road safety spokesman Dylan Thomsen supported the initiatives but said they needed to be coupled with a change in public mindset if they were to achieve the desired outcome. Any new road safety projects would need to go through a consenting process, and those had often been stymied by community resistance, he said.
Median barriers could reduce residents’ access to properties, while rumble strips, such as those recently removed on the Ka¯ piti expressway, north of Wellington, could be subject to noise complaints.
‘‘It all, in a way, comes back to a real mindset about how we think about road safety,’’ Thomsen said. ‘‘We still have a lot of people who really see crashes as being something that happens to bad drivers, or people who are almost deserving of what they get. [They think] it’s nothing to do with the roads or vehicles.’’
A recent AA study found reckless or dangerous driving was to blame for just half of 100 fatal crashes, and only a quarter of 200 serious injury crashes.
‘‘People are trying to do the right thing, and making mistakes,’’ Thomsen said. ‘‘It’s easy to think they shouldn’t have done that and, yes, that’s true. But we’ve all had times when we haven’t seen somebody on the road as quickly as we should have, or misjudged what someone is going to do, or been distracted or tired.
‘‘We need to have a mindset of making sure that, when people do make these mistakes, they’re going to have as much chance as possible to not end up in a crash.’’
National road policing manager Superintendent Steve Greally agreed the majority of ‘‘road trauma’’ was caused by people making mistakes but said those mistakes should not be happening.
There were too many instances of people driving too fast for the conditions, not wearing seatbelts, and using cellphones while driving, he said.
‘‘There are so many people flouting that law it’s ridiculous. It’s really, really disappointing that people are still doing this stuff. Probably the most gutting part of it is the innocent people [affected]. Unfortunately, at times, they’re the ones being collected in this as well by somebody who just couldn’t care less.’’