Andrew Bell: Speeding, the violent crime so many commit

COMMENT

Public reaction to increased police enforcement of road speed law provides a good opportunity to raise some of the lesser-known facts about our need for speed, and the chance to raise the level of debate above the myth that enforcement is solely a means of revenue collection.

Excessive speed has become the leading cause of death and trauma on New Zealand roads since a significant co-ordinated effort went into successfully reducing drink-drive-related trauma over the past decade.

Currently, speed contributes to 32 per cent of all fatal crashes, or more than 140 deaths a year. This creates an annual social cost to the country of $700 million, not to mention the trauma suffered by friends, families and other drivers caught up in these crashes.

Speeding is not the activity of a minority of errant drivers. Most drivers regularly break the speed limit on all classes of roads, at all times of day and on all days of the week.

A lot of us do not regard speeding as a serious offence, especially if we are alone when speeding, and it is relatively affordable for some of us.

Yet, somewhat ironically, when we are surveyed as drivers we describe speeding as an issue of the highest priority and recommend that law enforcement be increased - especially in our own street - including by the use of speed cameras. Most people, including drivers, want action on speed.

So how do we explain this split personality?

In simple terms it comes down to 'I'm a better driver' or what is also known psychologically as the actor-observer effect. People tend to attribute their own behaviour to the situation they are in and the behaviour of others to their personality characteristics.

So when others crash while speeding it is due to their ineptness as drivers; when we crash while speeding it is due to the external environment.

This gives us the amazing ability to continue driving with excessive speed while condemning others doing it. Related to this, the shorter your driving history, the less likely you are to consider yourself in danger of crashing.

Unfortunately, the crash statistics do not hold out much hope for our confused beliefs.

It is difficult to survive high-speed crashes. There is a massive body of empirical evidence that unequivocally establishes the relationship between speed and crash risk - the chances of having a fatal crash are twice as likely when you travel at 120 km/h as at 100 km/h.

Many of New Zealand's open roads were originally designed for speeds less than 100 km/h. Many families know this to their own traumatic cost.

So how best to reduce speed-related crashes?

Some countries have done better than others, and much better than us. Australia takes pride in having reduced speed-related crashes and trauma significantly through consistent and aggressive speed-management strategies. Victoria has reported a slump in revenue from speeding fines as a result.

Speed-management strategies offer great social, environmental and economic benefits by prioritising action on driver awareness, road design and compliance with speed limits.

These strategies include television advertising, the re-engineering of speed blackspots, urban traffic calming, interactive speed limit signage, lower speed limits (40 km/h around schools) and, of course, law enforcement by ticketing.

Looking to the future, automatic speed-limiters offer great potential for enforcing compliance with speed limits.

Given the widespread disregard for these limits here, active enforcement has sometimes been considered problematic, yet it plays an essential and proven role in many speed management initiatives.

Public criticism of increased speeding law enforcement reminds me of the outcry when drink-driving laws were toughened 10 years ago. Drink-driving is now considered socially unacceptable by the mainstream, and crash statistics reflect that change.

Drink-driving and speeding pose similar crash risks, but are treated differently in terms of sanctions and fines.

It is also true that some 70 per cent of fatal crashes do not involve alcohol, yet no one is suggesting that we are too hard on drink-drivers or that police should let up on those who drink and drive.

Why should police let up on speeding drivers when they are killing more people than drunks?

Renewed efforts are necessary to make illegal speeding as socially unacceptable as drinking and driving if we are to succeed in reducing speed-related road trauma.

What some people also fail to recognise is that increased speed law enforcement is only one of the strategies necessary to bring about a change in social attitudes towards speeding, and it requires a consistent and committed level of enforcement activity over a long period before significant and lasting reductions in speed trauma are seen.

The Government has set the national target for road casualty reduction in its 2010 road safety strategy at 300 fatalities, and is rolling out engineering, education and enforcement initiatives to achieve this.

This target is achievable, given the increasing range of speed-management measures now available, but it requires strong leadership and commitment from national, regional and local stakeholders as well as the public to make it happen.

As a sports enthusiast working in the road safety environment I often wonder why we do not aspire to become world champions at saving the greatest number of lives on our roads.

It is not something that people like to contemplate, but speed-related trauma is one of the most violent and prevalent forms of death we produce in our country, and far outweighs the amount of trauma related to the drug P, for example.

All those revenue-gathering debates fade quite quickly at the site of a fatal crash.

* Andrew Bell is the Auckland Regional Council's road safety co-ordinator.


Herald Feature: Road safety