For whom the road tolls

By GEOFF CUMMING

Heat rises on a cloudless Waikato morning and traffic head Leo Tooman paces the floor of his Te Rapa office. "A warm day like today makes me pretty nervous. After lunch is a real downtime for the body and, when it's warm and humid, that's when you notice people drifting across the centre line.

"And when two cars are coming at each other at 100km/h, that's a huge impact. The body can't take it."

Waikato roads are among the most dangerous in New Zealand and Tooman, one of the country's most experienced traffic officials, has seen enough carnage to speak judiciously about the causes of accidents and how to prevent them.

"All sorts of things happen in a car," he says.

"It's the human factor."

Which is why Tooman supports this week's call from the Land Transport Safety Authority to broaden the focus of road safety beyond the driver, to place more emphasis on road engineering.

LTSA director David Wright, while wanting no let-up in the present enforcement and education approach, wants more done to allow for driver error so that crashes are survivable.

While applauding the continuing decline in the road toll, Wright believes the greatest scope for future reductions lies in engineering work - filling in ditches and creating shoulders on rural highways, installing median and shoulder barriers, providing more passing lanes, removing power poles and designing safer new roads and intersections.

Tooman agrees. Waikato's two-lane highways are nearing capacity and all that separates opposing traffic is a strip of paint, he says. Alongside them are solid wooden poles and drainage ditches with concrete culverts.

"It's the sudden stop that kills the individual, no two ways about it."

Statistics tell us that speed, alcohol and failure to give way are the three biggest killers, but Tooman says the dynamics of a crash are far more complex.

With their fast acceleration, power steering and comfort and safety features, modern cars are supposedly easier to drive, but there's a false sense of security about these lethal weapons.

"People just don't realise the dangers involved. I think, with a lot of people, their perception of what's actually happening out there is far different from reality."

Less experienced colleagues can be cynical about the victims they encounter, but Tooman avoids blaming popular targets such as young hoons.

"If you want a profile, it's usually guys in their 30s with a reasonably modern sort of car. They've got the grunt, they've got to go fast.

"But the vast majority of people out there are pretty keen to get home each day."

In the late-1990s, while the national road toll was falling, Waikato was developing a reputation as the country's road-carnage capital.

"One December we had 15 people killed, including lots of multiples. We had staff dragging six-month-old babies and three-year-old children out of wrecks.

"It was unbelievable. The only reason they died was because they were unrestrained.

"It's frustrating, particularly with all the publicity we had done about using restraints."

But since a dedicated highway patrol fleet was introduced, fatalities have halved in the region. Tooman says it is due to rigorous enforcement of speed limits, seatbelt use and drink-driving laws.

"Enforcement gets the biggest returns in the short-term. Education is generational, and engineering costs megabucks."

But Wright's comments this week reflect a growing conviction that the education and enforcement thrust has reached saturation point.

Even if we keep up the present enforcement and advertising, and vehicle design continues to improve, he says the level of road trauma will probably stay about where it is now - "we'll simply be treading water".

Last year's toll of 403, the lowest since 1963, follows a steady descent from the 1987 peak of 795 deaths and more than 5000 serious injuries.

But Wright says it's still not good enough. The decline, although impressive, started from a much worse position than other comparable countries. We could hardly not do better.

But our fatality rate of 1.7 for every 10,000 vehicles is nearly 50 per cent higher than Britain's and lags behind other top-performers Sweden, Norway and Australia.

The Government aims to reduce the toll to 300 by 2010, a 50 per cent reduction on the 2001 figure. Wright says that will still leave us behind the leading countries. Sweden, for instance, has a goal of no road deaths or serious injuries under its "vision zero" policy. We should be setting our sights as low, he says.

"The very use of the term 'road toll' implies a tacit acceptance of a certain number of deaths and injuries - are we really prepared to pay for the privilege of using our roads with the lives of 400 people a year?"

"We need to shift our whole way of thinking - we don't tolerate death or injury in the workplace or in other modes of transport, so why do we accept it on the roads?"

To make real progress, we must intensify present programmes and introduce new measures.

In line with European trends, he says attention should turn to road design and engineering measures to make crashes "survivable".

Transit NZ already does much of this work - installing passing lanes and shoulder strips and realigning roads, for instance. Many safety measures, such as trimming trees and wire cable median barriers, are relatively cheap.

But the safety authority's stance clearly raises the need for the Government to give more if it is serious about further reducing the road toll.

Transport Minister Paul Swain is not promising to come to the party any time soon. "At some stage one of the options will be to call for more funding. We're not at that point yet."

Instead, he has asked officials to examine whether the best use is being made of "the very large pot of money that we have" and whether spending in areas like education can be reprioritised. He expects to be in a position to "re-tweak" expenditure by mid-year.

The social cost of road fatalities - the value placed on the lives lost - is calculated to be $3 billion a year. The Government spends about $350 million a year on road safety enforcement and education, including $9 million on graphic advertising campaigns, while road maintenance and design improvements by Transit NZ and local authorities have a road safety component.

Lobby groups such as the Automobile Association say the Government could easily increase its contribution to road safety because all the money comes from road users in the form of petrol taxes, licensing fees and road-user charges. And the Government puts far less into the roading network than it collects each year.

Cynics also argue that TV ads and police checkpoints at 11 in the morning are an easy way to be seen to be addressing road safety.

Debate continues to rage about the effectiveness of the advertisements which target speed, drink-driving and seatbelt use.

Since they began in 1995, road deaths involving speed have dropped from 221 to 130 in 2001 and those involving alcohol from 200 to 115. Deaths blamed on not wearing a seatbelt have dropped from 112 to 76.

But Massey University researchers in 1998 found it was misleading to link the ads to the declining road toll, a trend which began well before the first campaign in 1995.

The study by Terry Macpherson and Tony Lewis "failed to find any substantial relationship" between drink-drive advertising and drink-drive behaviour.

Accident researcher John Bailey says the reduction in the road toll has far more to do with safer vehicles, safer roads and improved emergency treatment than the clampdown on drink driving and speeding.

But he concedes that most motorists have responded to drink-driving messages. "These people aren't the problem - the problem lies with hardcore drink-drivers."

Bailey advocates more sophisticated enforcement, such as fitting devices to the vehicles of repeat offenders which force them to pass a breath test before activating the ignition.

The LTSA says independent analysis shows the joint enforcement-advertising plan is working and attitudes to road safety and on-road behaviour have improved.

A 4c a litre increase in the petrol tax last February allowed a $22 million funding boost to target drink-driving on rural roads, heavy vehicle safety and patrols on Auckland motorways.

Police say open road speeds have begun to drop since the introduction of a dedicated highway patrol fleet of 183 cars in the past two years.

A 1km/hr drop in speed is calculated to reduce road deaths by up to 5 per cent.

Paul Swain, who became Transport Minister after the July election, says evidence that viewers change channels to avoid the "blood and guts" ads makes them no less effective.

But, as with any marketing campaign, he says a saturation point is reached, and future ads will be more positive and educational.

Swain has been under fire for refloating the proposal to lower the drink-drive limit from 80 to 50 mg/100ml of blood, an idea most see as a revenue-gathering exercise.

Experts say the proposal will have a negligible impact on deaths as there's little evidence that this group is more accident-prone. Instead, the Government should spend more to target recidivists who drive with two or three times the legal limit on board.

Swain agrees the message has not got through to hardcore drink-drivers and promises steps mid-year to "keep them off the roads". He says judges are still not taking the issue seriously enough.

But it's important to maintain a balance between enforcement, education and engineering, says Swain.

"Road design is clearly not the only thing. People die on perfectly straight, clear roads."

A specialist in transport engineering research, Samuel Charlton, agrees that progress cannot be made by focusing only on one aspect of road safety.

"You can't engineer roads without taking into consideration the vehicles and the people driving them," says Charlton, of Waikato University's psychology department.

The road toll would be dramatically reduced by building median barriers on every highway, but the public will is lacking, he says.

"We're in a position right now where we're still willing to trade dollars for lives. We've yet to reach the stage, as Sweden has, of saying it's morally unacceptable to have a system that kills the people who pay for it.

"I don't think we're going to make the big jump [in reducing fatalities] until we as a country make that decision. There are people who've lost loved ones who are willing to take that step, but right now the majority like driving fast."

Herald feature: Cutting the road toll

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