Editorial: Get cracking on road safety measures

The road toll yesterday stood at 193, the highest at the end of June than in any of the last five years.

The seven people who died from the head-on crash at Waverley in south Taranaki were part of the tragic tally.

A police investigation eventually will provide an explanation for the collision but it would seem that one of the vehicles crossed the centre-line at a gradual bend into the path of the other car. Conditions were said to be good, and State Highway 3 was apparently fine and dry at the point of impact.

The loss of life from the single crash made it one of New Zealand's most devastating road accidents, and once more raises questions whether enough is being done to make driving safe.

There will, sadly, always be road fatalities and no amount of money will make driving absolutely secure. At present, some $600 million is being invested over six years targeting the prevention of 900 deaths and serious injuries on high-risk rural state highways over a decade.

The Safe Roads and Roadsides Programme is designed to make about 1500km of state highway safer with proven measures such as rumble strips, shoulder widening, safety barriers, clearer signs and more appropriate speed limits.

However this approach could change or perhaps be accelerated. The Government Policy Statement on land transport announced yesterday makes safety a key strategic priority.

The Government says it will investigate a "Vision Zero" approach to road safety, moving away from the view that road deaths are unavoidable towards a standpoint that crashes are predictable and therefore preventable.

Sweden pioneered the idea two decades ago when it passed a law calling for an end to road deaths and serious injuries.

At the time, in 1997, 7 people in 100,000 were dying on Swedish roads. In 2015, fewer than 3 people per 100,000 were killed. The figure for New Zealand in 2016 was 7 per 100,000. Clearly fatal accidents still occur in Sweden, but its safety record has markedly improved.

Tiredness, inattention, failure to keep left, speed, drugs and alcohol and loss of control are the most common causes of fatal accidents in New Zealand. Some of those factors can be addressed by making roads safer, especially rural roads, where many fatalities occur.

The Waikato region for instance, with its large land area and open rural roads, is the deadliest in the country for driving. In the seven years to June 2017 there were 440 fatalities on Waikato roads.

The Taranaki road where Wednesday's dreadful crash occurred was on a list to get safety improvements. It can take two years or more from the time a safety project is proposed to the start of the job.

If the Government wants to reverse the rising road toll it could make a start by ensuring that safety work on the rural road network gets underway much sooner.

When lives are at stake, the installation of barriers and safer speed limits should not require endless rounds of consultation. If we talking of the survival of 900 New Zealanders then these and other measures surely cannot come soon enough.