Editorial: On road safety, New Zealand can learn from other countries

Heavy traffic on the Southern Motorway as holiday traffic builds. Photo / Waka Kotahi

During the pandemic New Zealand has got used to standing out from the crowd and doing better on Covid-19 health safety than bigger, wealthier countries.

When it comes to everyday road safety we have to admit this country has a lot of room to improve and can learn from other places. The OECD comparisons are not kind on this issue.

In the first two articles of a five-part series for the Herald, Simon Wilson looked at driver behaviour, speeds, and whether police enforcement with checkpoints and speed cameras was sufficient.

Even with international tourists being away the holiday road toll has reached 14 already, alongside reports of holiday traffic gridlock and calls to take more time while driving.

Kiwis are tasting domestic delights - the flavours available to us at present - and with the population estimated at 5,126,300 there's more of us out and about.

Automobile Association (AA) spokesman Mike Noon, in a Newstalk ZB interview, zeroed in on two areas where we could do better - the quality of our roads and the vehicles on them. He said that up to 100 lives could be saved each year if road improvements were made.

"Australia is on track to have about 4.4 road deaths per 100,000 people. We have 6.3 and the best countries in the world - which are some of the Nordic countries - they're more around about two," Noon said.

"If we had the same road death rate as Australia, 100 people less would've died this past year."

If that were the case New Zealand's road tolls for both 2021 and 2020 would have been about 220 killed in each year. Yet despite less mobility and lower traffic volumes with the pandemic and lockdowns, the past two years have continued the trend of the past 60. Only a few times in six decades have fewer than 300 people been killed annually on the roads.

Still, there's still been an overall decrease during that time: In 1987 a total of 795 people died on the roads. In recent years fatalities have numbered: 380 in 2017; 378 in 2018; 352 in 2019; 320 in 2020 and 319 in 2021.

Noon said: "Quite a lot of our roads need maintenance done on them ... these are roads that are bumpy, have potholes, the tar is flushed ... and they lose their grippiness for the tyres of your vehicle."

He also points out that "we have an old fleet. So the vehicles that we're in, when it does go wrong, do not protect us as well as those countries that have a better standard of car with more safety features."

The European Union approach to road safety covers driver behaviour, speed limits, infrastructure, and technological features in vehicles.

A European Automobile Manufacturers' Association document on road safety says "Europe's fastest roads – expressways with multiple lanes – are statistically the safest, while single carriageways [two-lanes] tend to be the most dangerous".

In 2018, 9 per cent of fatalities in the European Union were on motorways, 38 per cent in urban areas, and 53 per cent on rural roads.

The upgrades here to important roads such as State Highway 1 between Auckland and Hamilton, with more straight lines and extra lanes, should improve safety.

Considering the OECD estimated the cost of New Zealand road crashes in 2018 at 1.8 per cent of GDP, improvements make social, health and economic sense.