Grace Coulter: How safe is it to overtake in the oncoming passing lane?

How do we currently know a portion of road is dangerous? By waiting for a Coroner to declare it so. Photo / Stuart Munro, File

OPINION

Creating a healthy and safe work environment by identifying risk so as to minimise or eliminate accidents is an important legal responsibility for every individual.

The well-known and accepted five steps of risk management strategy in order to reduce injury and death in the work environment are as follows: Identify hazards; assess the risk level for each hazard identified; control the risk to reduce the harm and its severity; reassess the level of risk for each hazard; and review and monitor that controls are working and risk levels are acceptable.

Anyone who does not follow these is held accountable if there is an accident.

Why is it then this risk management procedure does not appear to be followed with regard to road safety, but instead countermeasures are taken by the NZ Transport Agency based on statistics of road crashes at different locations, i.e after the accidents have already occurred?

"A New Zealand guide to the treatment of crash locations" advises "having identified the elements of the road and traffic environment or driver behaviour, which may have contributed to the crashes, it is now time to consider countermeasures. There are no 'general' road safety solutions; for a solution to be effective, it must be applied to a particular problem, which it is known to affect. It must be an effective countermeasure."

So much is wrong with the approach. It flips around the correct order of identifying risk before accidents happen. Imagine if manufacture or industry took the same approach as those concerned with road safety and waited for accidents to statistically verify whether action was needed to minimise risk.

Why is road safety the exception? Are those concerned with building our roads immune from the legal responsibility which governs every other New Zealander?

In 2018, 377 people died on NZ roads. This figure reduced slightly in 2019 to 353. In contrast, workplace deaths totalled 63 in 2018 and 108 in 2019 (including the deaths in the December 2019 Whakaari volcanic eruption). These numbers surely speak for themselves.

It is also not necessarily correct that "for a solution to be effective, it must be applied to a particular problem, which it is known to affect. It must be an effective countermeasure."

Here's a stark example of this false statement:

Recently driving between Putāruru and Taupō on Labour Weekend, I observed two near misses - potentially head-on collisions - on a three-laned road.

Passing lanes are anticipated by drivers as a safe area to move past slower vehicles. Photo / Geoff Sloan, File

I have always driven under the assumption that a passing lane was never shared by on-coming traffic. I think most people would also assume to be the case.

Nobody expects to meet another vehicle head-on when gathering up speed to pass and unable to escape back into their own lane. And yet, according to the Road Code, this assumption is incorrect.

After seeing these near misses, I observed more carefully the markings on the road and, sure enough, the on-coming traffic was legally allowed to use this passing lane. I also found that the Road Code also allowed this, provided the on-coming vehicle could see 100m of clear road in front the whole time they were passing.

When one considers that the time to take evasive action from on-coming traffic is half this distance due to the combined speed of both vehicles, the slight increase in average speed in order to pass and the inability of the passing vehicle to get back into their lane due to other vehicles on the side or behind who are also trying to pass, the Road Code itself is at fault and absolutely crazy.

After seeing these near misses and now understanding more clearly the actual Road Code that allows this, I will never feel comfortable using the passing lane until the code is changed. Others should also be aware of this risk when passing.

Grace Coulter. Photo / Supplied

With the number of head-on collisions in NZ, has it ever occurred to those concerned with these so-called countermeasures purported in the "New Zealand guide to the treatment of crash locations" that changing the road markings on a specific stretch based on statistics of head-on collisions would not solve the general problem on all the other passing lanes?

Surely common sense would prevail that fundamentally changing the Road Code so that a passing lane can only be used for traffic going one direction is the correct solution?

This is absurd.

The solution is two-fold. Firstly, those responsible for road safety must follow the five-step recommendations that apply to every other New Zealander, and be made accountable. They should not base their decisions on the number of accidents that have already occurred in one location, but instead identify, minimise and preferably eliminate risk and reassess the risk for each hazard before accidents happen based on the well-accepted rules given by the risk management procedure.

If they had followed the five-step risk management strategy, how many accidents could have been avoided?

I have highlighted only one case where the approach of "fixing" one location at a time based on statistics of accidents doesn't work because the issue is more general to all other situations of passing lanes.

This approach to road safety is grotesque and heartless. As Bob Dylan wrote in his song Blowin' in the Wind, "Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knows that too many people have died?"

Secondly, we need to immediately change the Road Code for the case highlighted and paint the appropriate lines on the road at passing lanes. It should be obvious that only one-directional traffic can use a passing lane.

Awareness of this in a new Road Code and a little bit of paint, and all those people didn't need to die.

Rapid action is now needed to save lives.

• Grace Coulter is director and inventor of Sojol heating, cooling and ventilation products