Driving ourselves to despair

It's a quiet Tuesday morning on the roads of central Auckland but driving instructor Harald Leeuwenburgh still gives a resigned sigh. The car in front has just accelerated to get through an intersection before the orange light turns red.

Everyone knows orange lights mean slow down and stop if you can. But a lot of people speed up instead.

Up the rise on the road dividing the busy shops at Parnell, a mother and child step on to a pedestrian crossing but a woman in a little red hatchback either doesn't see them or thinks if she keeps her speed up she will be able to zoom past without hitting them. She manages, but it's close.

At the intersection of Albert and Wyndham Sts there are a multitude of daily near misses and frequent hits.

Leeuwenburgh spots the problem immediately. This set of traffic lights has no green arrows, so drivers make their own decisions on when to turn - and those decisions are often bad.

Traffic lights without arrows are a peculiarity of New Zealand, as are roads without centre lines and highways without median barriers, says the Dutchman who has lived here for a decade.

These things certainly do not help with road safety but there are other reasons why so many New Zealanders are bad drivers, worse than our counterparts in the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, although statistically better than the United States and Canada.

In the main, say the experts, it comes down to one thing: Kiwi drivers have a bad attitude. Friendly and laid back, sure, most of the time. But put them behind the wheel and they turn stupid.

Those continual infringements we saw on Tuesday morning in Auckland are symptomatic of a much bigger nationwide problem. It is said there is nowhere as dangerous in New Zealand as our roads. There was yet another head-on collision last weekend at the notorious Mangatawhiri/Maramarua stretch of road, following three deaths there the week before.

Statistics suggest we are getting better. But that's not enough - we are still killing hundreds of people a year with our shocking driving.

Last year 435 people died, 26 fewer than the year before but 31 more than in 2002.

And the bald figures do not portray the misery of relatives and the trauma of the thousands of people injured. It is not that no one is doing anything about it. All manner of measures have been taken and some seem to have worked.

The graduated driver licensing system of restricted licences with night curfews, is credited with halving the death rate among 15- to 19-year-olds.

The Government's aim for 2010 is to have no more than 300 deaths and 4500 needing a spell in in hospital.

There are stricter enforcement policies against speeding and drunk drivers, education targeting older drivers, new drivers, drink-drivers and speeding drivers. And there are other programmes to hammer road sense into school children, whose age means they are still developing attitudes and behaviour about road use.

There are websites for everyday drivers who get no more education from the time they get their licence until they are 80, and courses aimed at examining attitudes and driving practices.

The figures show we have improved. On the basis of deaths related to the number of cars, we have moved from 15th (1997) to 10th among 28 OECD countries, just behind Australia.

So why is Leo Tooman so worried?

Inspector Tooman is the road policing manager for the Waikato and already this year, in just one month, nine people have died on his patch.

Driving head-on into another car happens with sickening regularity.

Most of the nine deaths were on 100km/h roads and were head-on collisions. Often they were cars hitting trucks.

"I think people have to realise that if they do collide with a truck they're probably going to die," Tooman says. "In fact, I'll guarantee they're going to die."

It staggers this veteran, who has seen the carnage too many times , that drivers fail to stay on their own side. There are very few people who would actually make a decision to go out and steal something, he says, "and yet people are quite prepared to take the other guy's side of the road, and they don't see too much wrong with it".

It's not so much stupid overtaking. The main problem is people who drift across the road because they're not concentrating, or who run on to gravel on the left of their lane and then yank hard on their steering wheel to move right, overcompensating and sending them out of control and into oncoming traffic. It's better to drive off the road through a fence than to plough into a car or a truck coming in the other direction.

Tooman blames complacency. People simply don't take driving seriously.

"We all do it. We all take driving far too casually and the reality of it is if we make an error when driving the chances are we could pay for that error with our lives."

The average person in New Zealand gets a licence at 15 or 16 then turns into an instant expert. "We're all bloody good drivers and it's always the other fella who's the problem - that's the myth, which we all believe in."

Engineering psychologist Dr Sam Charlton also fingers complacency and a bad attitude for this country's death and injury toll.

New Zealand drivers are not fundamentally worse than those anywhere else, says the American who lectures at Waikato University and is the principal human factors scientist with Ternz, Transport Engineering Research New Zealand.

They have the same control skills and learn how to drive as quickly as people anywhere. But they have different perceptions about risks and different attitudes about driving.

One area where New Zealanders differ substantially is their attitude to speed.

"When you ask them questions like, 'How likely are you to race away from traffic lights with the intention of beating the driver next to you', or 'race ahead when you know your lane is ending to get in front of the other car', New Zealanders give much higher ratings than people in the UK, or Sweden, or Australia, or China - lots of places."

We are a competitive, pioneering nation, Charlton says. We love adventure and driving fast provides that rush.

Because we all think we are better drivers than everyone else, we think what we do is okay because it is not us who will make mistakes. Statistically, it is impossible for all drivers to be better than average.

Another danger Charlton identifies is something psychologists call the perception-decision-action cycle, where you see something, make a decision, then take action.

"Well, it cycles about 10,000 times in an hour of driving and 20,000 times on a curvy road or on a road with lots of traffic," Charlton says. "So it's real quick to form these automatic motor programmes, particularly on routes you travel often."

And when we go onto automatic pilot we are dangerous. We get bored and seek distractions - we daydream at the wheel, play loud music, text-message or talk on the cellphone.

Charlton once worked for the United States Airforce, where a lot of time and money was spent building-in all kinds of safeguards to keep pilots alert, to keep them from going into an "automatic pilot" mode.

This has never been done for drivers, Charlton says. Instead, driving has become easier, cars are bigger and faster with cruise control, and have built-in distractions such as CD players.

Driving, says Charlton, is harder than flying, yet people do it by the seat of their pants with no instruments to warn them to keep them on task.

Where Charlton runs into the most hostility with New Zealand drivers is when he talks about speed. Although surveys - including a Herald digipoll this month - show that most people agree with speed cameras and stricter enforcement, a core group don't consider speeding is a problem.

They tell him it is unfair to focus on speed. They claim they're safer going faster because it means they have less traffic around them, or that if they go faster they spend less time on the road so they must be safer.

"They are quite serious about this and I see these same attitudes in the letters to the editor in the paper and I just can't believe it," Charlton says.

When the human body suddenly decelerates from a fast speed, whether you are driving and hit something or whether you are bungy jumping and the cord breaks, there are physical consequences. People need to know this.

"One of the things that happens is that the aorta separates from your lung and you bleed to death internally. Horrible, gruesome things happen. The human body just wasn't made to do that sort of stuff." But attitudes can be changed, Charlton says. The US Airforce pilots he worked with were macho beyond macho, wore big watches and big hats but they used to fly their planes within the required limits even though they were capable of more.

"Why? Well, because if they violate the rules they don't get to fly any more. And flying is a lot of fun and it means a lot to their self-image.And yet when they got out of the plane and went off the tarmac they would drive their sports cars like stupid fools - and why? Because they hadn't received the same level of training to operate the car and the penalties weren't as great."

If you can change drivers' attitudes so they respect the car as a potential death-trap and not a toy, if they can be made to realise their driving could harm themselves or others and get society not to put up with it any more, then, Charlton says, all sorts of solutions become possible, not just draconian ones such as radically lowering the speed limit.

There are other simple ways to make people slow down. "For example, depending on where you paint the lines on the road you can make the road look wider or narrower and we know that on narrow roads people slow down and on wide roads people speed up," Charlton says.

Leeuwenburgh thinks New Zealand could learn from other countries, such as Holland, where you have to go to a driving school if you want your licence. In New Zealand mum or dad teach children in the supermarket car-park and if they have bad habits they pass them on.

"My students sometimes say, 'Why do I need to indicate - that other car's not indicating?' So you also get bad examples set out in front of you." Elsewhere, people are better at sticking to the rules.

Driving tests can be haphazard here, Leeuwenburgh says. Some are tough but other students come back after just 15 minutes with a pass, not having had to do any of the required manoeuvres.

Drivers here routinely fail to indicate, run red lights, don't observe following distances, and are always in a rush. It's symptomatic of that attitude that sees them abuse driving instructors, honking the horn, and tailgate and take out their pressure on other drivers.

Leeuwenburgh says if he stops in his driving school car for the orange lights, 95 per cent of the time people behind throw their hands up, frustrated, indicating that not just he but they too could have got through.

He has had several accidents where people have not expected him to stop and have run into the back of his car.

As he goes through that Wyndham and Albert St intersection, the light changes to orange midway but the taxi-driver behind him does not slow down.

"That's why," mutters the Dutchman, "there are so many accidents."

Motoring mayhem

* There are more than 2.7 million licensed drivers on our roads, half a million more than in 1993.

* Just 7 per cent are teenagers but their age group crashes more often than other age groups.

* Before graduated driver licensing was brought in, teens were involved in 20 per cent of fatal crashes. This has declined to about 10 per cent.

* In 1993 there were 600 deaths and 2500 serious injuries on our roads. By 2002, the best year for 40 years, the death toll had fallen to 404 but there were 2400 serious injuries.

* In the past 10 years 5000 people have been killed and 137,000 badly injured.

* The first fatal crash was in Christchurch in 1908. Since then more than 34,000 people have died.