Driving down the road toll

The ‘‘road toll’’ is a euphemism for the hundreds of deaths and mutilations that occur each year on our roads. The suffering and loss that flow from our love of cars should never be forgotten or lumpishly accepted as the price of modernity and convenience.

For that reason Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter’s decision to call a crisis meeting over the rise in the road toll is welcome. After a long period of decline, the toll in the past few years has gone up again. That’s a trend that must stop.

The difficulty for Genter and for the country is that the causes of that increase are many and not entirely understood. Reversing it will mean a series of fairly expensive changes on many fronts, and the pay-off might not come quickly.

In that case Genter will have spent some precious political capital for little result. But she deserves praise for launching the initiative anyway.

One plausible reason for the increase in deaths is that more people are on the road. The number of kilometres driven fell during the global financial crisis, as economic confidence declined and people used their cars less.

Here, Genter’s Green commitment to luring drivers from cars on to buses and trains fits with rational policy. She should refrain, however, from pushing her car-sceptic ideology beyond the bounds of evidence.

Another clear link with the increase in the road toll seems to be more motorcycle use, according to a major report in March by Deloitte. Motorcycles are quite simply death traps and rational people would rarely mount them. Reducing their use, however, won’t be simple.

One of the major reasons for the decline in crashes and deaths between the 1980s and about 2011 was the improvement of roads and of cars. This must continue, though New Zealand roads are by comparison with many first-world countries poor and dangerous and the cost of improving them is substantial.

Likewise our vehicle fleet is older than that of many comparable countries, and therefore less safe, although that situation is also improving.

One of the puzzling new trends is the rise in people not wearing seat belts. Here the need for a continued propaganda campaign seems clear. Neglecting to wear a seat belt is simply dopey, and non-wearers must be reminded of their folly.

The use of cellphones by drivers is another problem, and education is obviously needed. One study in 2011 revealed that 60 per cent of drivers had used a phone recently while at the wheel, but 38 per cent considered such use ‘‘moderately safe’’. Researchers point out that the academic literature ‘‘suggests otherwise’’.

Road safety has been much studied but there remains a real element of randomness or even unexplainability in road toll trends. It’s not entirely clear why the toll has gone up in recent years while for decades the trend had been downward.

The upward recent trend here, for instance, is matched by that in some other Western countries such as Austria, Finland and Israel. Changing that won’t be easy.