Dialogue: State highway a road to ruin

Sometimes it is a little disconcerting, the number of people I meet who turn out to have had near-fatal accidents on State Highway 1.

This is particularly disconcerting when I am about to drive a good portion of SH1 to Wellington. Everyone I meet has a tale to tell about the appalling crash (or, in several instances, crashes) they had on that road.

And more than that, each story outdoes the last. Certainly, everyone has material with which they are able to build on the theme.

I was thinking about all this on a ride north on SH1 (and should probably try to remind myself of it all again while tooling along that highway today in the dream state in which one tends to drive that drive). Everyone in that car had come off that highway in pretty spectacular form at some point.

As I say, each story was more spectacular than the last. The sky really is the limit in this field. I am not a particularly spiritual type, but it was hard not to think that it was something of a miracle that anyone in our car was there to tell their story at all.

One of the younger guys kicked things off by pointing out the place just outside Waipu where he not only fell asleep at the wheel but also leaned forward on to the accelerator while he was sleeping.

Someone else had a story about a close relative who fell asleep at the wheel and didn't come around until the car had taken out several fences and bogged itself deep in a paddock.

Another had a story about spinning the full 360 degrees on one of those too-narrow roads that are cut into the sides of hills. This speaker spun a full circle on the sort of road that you would normally consider too narrow even for a three-point turn.

Someone else had a yarn about the dark and stormy night that they lost control of a van on SH1 outside Tokoroa and spun (fortunately between logging lorries) across the median strip and into the southbound lane.

In something of a ghoulish twist, that person was helped that night, in the first instance, by a local woman whose younger sister was paralysed from the waist down in a bad crash a few years earlier on the same stretch of road.

The rescuer was in a greater state of shock than the crashees - they said she could barely bring herself to look in the van when she saw it there, in the dark, lying upside down on the wrong side of the road.

That was the point, really. Everyone telling these stories had survived precisely the sorts of accidents that have killed or maimed thousands over the years.

As you get older, though, you begin to understand that there is no good reason you should continue to beat road-toll odds. You begin to understand that you might be next after all.

That's why driving SH1 becomes more than a little disconcerting as time goes on. It becomes less and less possible to take it for granted that you'll make it.

It's an odd feeling, and I know I'll still have it when I get into the car this morning. I'll be heading off for a nice, long, free-wheeling, Easy Rider-type drive that I don't fully expect to survive.

Before I push off, though, I'd like to ask an entirely unrelated question: why is everyone suddenly so down on the Hero parade?

People keep rushing up to me and telling me that the parade's time has gone; that gays have held court for long enough; that it is time for another minority group to bring its issues into the limelight.

I wonder. I hate parades, but that doesn't stop me thinking that they have a place in other people's lives. At the very least, they're something to look at. People who look at them seem to enjoy themselves, too. Surely that counts for something. Does anyone really care what they're about?

Herald Online feature: Cutting the road toll

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LTSA: Road toll update

Massey University: Effectiveness of safety advertising