Getting tough only way to lower road toll, says expert

By MATHEW DEARNALEY

Professor Ian Johnston knows only too well as an engineer that the higher the speed of a car, the greater the mess when it crunches into an immovable object.

But as a psychologist - and the face of television advertising in which two cars hit a truck at slightly different speeds but with dramatically varying results - he knows what a hard road it is to convince people of such a basic law of physics.

Which is why the director of Monash University's Accident Research Centre in Melbourne and guest at the Local Authority Traffic Institute's (Trafinz) annual conference in Napier this week says there is no substitute for tougher enforcement to chop the road toll.

"People believe you have got to change attitudes to change behaviour, but in fact the reverse is true," he told the Herald in Auckland yesterday.

"Look at compulsory seat belts and cycle helmets. There was enormous public education saying it was very good for cyclists to wear helmets, but we never got large numbers of people doing it until we changed the law and enforced it.

"It was the same with drink-driving - unfortunately we have to wave the big stick."

Although New Zealand's road toll reached its lowest in four decades in 2002, with 404 deaths, it rose last year to 461 at the same time Professor Johnston's more populous state of Victoria fell to 330.

New Zealand's death rate is 1.6 for every 10,000 registered vehicles compared with 0.9 in Victoria, where Dr Johnston said authorities "got fair dinkum about speed for the first time" in 2001.

Dr Johnston accepts that steep reductions in road deaths since the late 1980s, part of a global trend as roads and vehicle designs improve, make it harder to shake motorists out of complacency about the extra risk they face even from small increases in speed.

"We all know that on a single given trip, the probability of having a crash is very low," he says. "But is killing more than 400 New Zealanders a year a reasonable thing? I would argue not."

He notes that although heart disease and cancer are still bigger killers in absolute terms, car crashes cause more deaths of people in their first 50 years and therefore account for a greater loss against normal life expectancy.

He admits Victoria's strict enforcement of speed limits rather than the 10km/h tolerance practised by New Zealand police was highly controversial at first, as was the addition of demerit points to speed-camera fines.

"But now the Government can point to the scoreboard - it has taken a lot of sting out of it."

His researchers estimate a 41 per cent reduction in the risk of deaths through crashes in areas where speed cameras operate, but he emphasises the deterrence value of the risk to motorists of losing a licence.

He believes the lack of demerit points with camera fines in New Zealand undermines enforcement, inviting criticism that authorities are mainly interested in revenue-gathering.

"What it is saying is that speeding is not all that important but we are pretty keen on raising revenue."

The former Victorian State road safety director with a doctorate in human factors of engineering, acknowledges his anti-speeding message is not rocket science but says it is hard resisting the cumulative effect of motor industry advertising and movie car chases.

"We know it is fiction and we make allowances for that, but it can be difficult bringing our beliefs back to reality."

This was reinforced by vehicle design in which the maximum allowable speed was shown at the halfway point on speedometers and there were no rules governing engine capacity to match safety features such as seatbelts, airbags and crumple zones.

"If you're in a crash at high speed I don't care how any airbags and seatbelts and whatever else is in your car - you are in serious trouble."

Road toll

New Zealand 461 (2003), or 1.6 for every 10,000 registered vehicles.

Victoria, Australia 330, or 0.9 for every 10,000 vehicles.

In Northern Territory, where there is no open-road speed limit, the equivalent per-vehicle death toll is 5.