Dialogue: Road to improved safety starts with every driver

By SELWYN PARKER*

Yes, New Zealand can do a lot to reduce its terrible road toll. And, as the New Zealand Herald's campaign has pointed out, we could do a lot worse than look across the Tasman, where, in general, they've been tougher, smarter and more committed than us, and for a longer period of time.

Among other things, roads in Australia tend to be better designed, with wider safety margins, more traffic-calming measures, more predictable surfaces.

Enforcement is firmer. In Victoria, the police hand out 10,000 instant $A135 ($165) fines a year for using hand-held phones, while we are still thinking about legislation banning their use at the wheel.

Driver education is more helpful and less bloodthirsty than here. A researcher into the psychology of driving told me that New Zealand television campaigns are remarkably gory.

The security of vulnerable minority road-users such as cyclists is provided for by federal and state legislation rather than left much to chance, as has been the case until recently in New Zealand.

And the results show. Since Australia's annus horribilis of 1970, when 3798 people died on the roads and traffic safety authorities began to attack an annual toll that has run up 163,000 fatalities since records began in 1925, the human carnage has been more than halved.

And the Australians have achieved that in spite of a 250 per cent increase in the number of vehicles on the road.

Australia is now aiming to do much better, to halve the number of deaths by 2010, which would save 5000 lives. It's simply not acceptable, the National Road Safety Strategy declares, to accept broken bodies as the price of mobility.

Along the way, Australian researchers have learned a lot about what, or who, kills on the roads. And it's not the so-called rogue drivers - the drunks, the red light-runners, the chronic speedsters, the aggressive and the genuinely malign. It is the ordinary drivers like you and me.

Although rogue drivers cause more than their fair share of death and injury and are constantly being targeted, the logic is obvious. Rogue drivers account for about 5 per cent of the total, which isn't enough to cause Australia's 1800 deaths a year.

By common agreement, most of the road toll is caused by well-meaning people who are, for whatever reason, inattentive, overconfident or even unsuitable behind a wheel.

For example, Australian researchers are increasingly worried about the fast-rising incidence of crashes involving old people who drive more than they did 20 years ago. It's not that they want to force older drivers from behind the wheel but the statistics do illustrate how important it is for 70-plus motorists to work at their skills.

The trouble is that we get away with bad habits for years and come to think we are far better drivers than we are. Most drivers constantly underestimate the risk of their behaviour behind the wheel, safety expert Stephen Gray says. It usually takes a crash to destroy that overconfidence.

A landmark 1988 Australian study showed the dreadful consequences of driving just that few kilometres an hour too fast at the wrong time, something many of us do without a second thought. The University of Adelaide's road accident research unit attended 1000 casualty crashes (those causing death or injury) in the city over several years, and studied 150 exhaustively. All occurred in daytime and few involved alcohol at any level. In short, these crashes involved ordinary drivers.

The conclusions? The risks of speeding increase exponentially, explains the unit's head, Professor Jack McLean. At 65 km/h in a 60 km/h zone, the risk of a casualty crash doubles. At 70 km/h, it quadruples. And at 75 km/h, the risk increases eight-fold. If the drivers had been travelling at the speed limit, nearly half of the crashes would have been avoided and the severity of the injuries would have been reduced in those crashes that probably still would have occurred. A lot of drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, skateboarders and other road-users would be alive today.

It's hard to pin down the precise extent of driving of indifferent quality, but American research suggests that most drivers commit minor offences every day, many of which will cause a crash in the wrong combination of circumstances. The trouble is, most of us think we are great drivers purely because we have never had a bad crash. But that could just be good luck.

Every time drivers return home safely, their belief in their ability increases, points out Warren Harrison of Monash University, an expert on driver psychology. And so we tend to drive to the limit of our imagined skills, too often with fatal consequences.

* Selwyn Parker is a journalist who rates himself a careful and lucky driver, having had two minor crashes in 43 years on the roads of five countries.

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