Steven Joyce: Increase in road toll is the grim price of political decisions

Something clearly has gone wrong as the number of deaths on our roads rises from a decade ago. Photo / Tania Whyte

OPINION

The AA has done us all a service by highlighting the number of people being killed on our roads as a result of drunk driving. Last year was horrific: 111 deaths were caused by people who were either above the legal limit or refused a test. That’s double the number from 2013, just under a decade ago.

The overall road toll was horrific too. We had 377 deaths on the road last year. In 2013, the recent low, just 253 died on our roads. Still too many, but 124 fewer. Something clearly has gone wrong.

It is fair to place some of the blame on our pandemic response. However successful it was in containing the spread of the virus, it appears to have caused untold harm to the fabric of our society. Whether it shows up in ram raids and delinquent behaviour, drinking and driving, or truancy from school, locking people in their houses for months on end seems to have torn the fabric of society and encouraged more risky and rebellious behaviour by a sizeable chunk of our population. I can only hope our Covid Royal Commission, which has been very quiet lately, is beavering away in the background grappling with some of these thorny issues.

The second problem relates to the first. There has been insufficient focus by police on drunk driving, and in particular roadside checkpoints. The statistics obtained by the AA lay it bare. Police have been well under their target for roadside breath testing for the past few years, and well down on the numbers achieved around the time of our lowest road toll, in 2013.

This is no doubt in part due to the additional responsibilities given to police during the pandemic. Time spent guarding regional borders and quarantine hotels is time not spent on other policing. The number of breath tests is now apparently trending up again, but unlikely to reach the 3 million annual target any time soon. Given the spike in risky and lawless behaviour among the population, including on our roads, alcohol checkpoints should be more visible than normal, not less.

Then there is the weakening of the general link between crime and punishment that this Government has been so fond of. Nobody is arguing for locking up your average traffic rule-breaker, but at the recidivist, dangerous and deliberate end of offending, there is every likelihood that the plan to empty out our prisons makes determined rulebreakers more fearless.

Any campaign to reduce the road toll relies on the general public buying into and supporting the plan. That is where the ill-conceived “Road to Zero” safety strategy is, ironically, another part of the problem. Believability is an important part of any public information campaign, and “Road to Zero” is more likely to be lampooned than believed. Back when I was Transport Minister, we settled on a much more believable strapline - “Safer Journeys” - for precisely this reason.

More significantly, transport officials seem to be going out of their way to get the public offside, rather than onside, about all things transport. There’s an unmistakable whiff that government officials (both central and local) think all drivers are somehow “wrong” in their choice of transport. They want to ban cars from certain streets and keep them to ridiculously slow speeds on others. It’s hard work to get the public onside for a road-safety campaign when you are showing no understanding of the lives of the law-abiding. They see a lax attitude to high-risk drivers and frustrating restrictions for them.

The most egregious example of a lack of customer focus is the Transport Agency’s new tendency to close the Auckland Harbour Bridge the moment the wind gets up a bit. Hundreds of thousands of people can have their lives inconvenienced every time it happens, and the transport officials shrug their shoulders and say it’s about managing risk. Managing risk is all about tradeoffs, and as far as the public is concerned, the tradeoffs in terms of public inconvenience are not being considered.

Commuters are inconvenienced every time the Auckland Harbour Bridge is closed because the wind gets up a bit. Photo / Michael Craig

The citizens of Northland are experiencing another all-too-serious inconvenience. The Government’s investment decisions there have prioritised anything but resilience, with the result that Northland is this weekend partly cut off once more. What wouldn’t we give now for a resilient new transport link between Warkworth and Wellsford of the calibre of the one just opened further south.

The final big issue is a lack of leadership. We are now onto our fourth minister in the transport or associate transport portfolios in the past three years, and who knows how long Kiri Allan will last. Michael Wood was at least there for a while, but his transport preoccupations had little in common with the experience of mums and dads juggling the school run with getting to and from work.

It will take a concerted effort on both drink-driving and more generally to bend our road toll back down again. I was around when it last happened, and it took some high-profile law changes (zero limits for under-20s and recidivist drink drivers), new tools like alcohol interlocks, and a concerted road safety policing effort which took the time to get the public onside, to achieve the results we did. That included some difficult conversations with the Minister of Police about police fulfilling their contract with the Ministry of Transport on road safety activities. Currently, police are being diverted away from their contracted road safety responsibilities about 30 per cent of the time.

This time around it should be less about law changes and more about enforcement. Most deaths on the road are caused by someone who is already breaking the existing law in some way. We need more effort on policing high-risk road users, including more patrols late at night and in the early morning. At the sentencing end, we need a tougher approach, and a greater use of alcohol interlocks, which are currently only used about two-thirds of the time they could be. Interlocks have been proven to work. And all of this will require a focused, driven minister.

Unfortunately, the current Cabinet are too preoccupied with spending billions of dollars rearranging the public service deckchairs than doing something as mundane as achieving results, be it in transport or any other portfolio. And that’s in “normal” times. While this current revolving door of ministerial scandals continues, it’s even less likely a minister will stop, think and change direction. In the meantime, we are headed for another big road toll this year.

- Steven Joyce is a former National Minister of Finance and Minister of Transport. He is director at Joyce Advisory.