John McCrystal: Holiday season marked by recurring tragedy

An average of 17.7 people are killed on NZ roads each year during the Christmas period. Photo / Greg Bowker

It's a cruel tragedy. The victims began their day much like any other, breezily farewelling their loved ones and setting off with no inkling that they were mere hours away from a sudden and violent death.

It's all the more tragic for being foreseeable and preventable.

We are talking about the Pike River coal mine tragedy, aren't we? Well, no. We're talking about something that's much worse.

This tragedy doesn't, as a rule, claim as many lives all in one go but it's worse because it has become an annual event. And for every victim that it kills outright, it injures and maims far more. It tears apart lives and leaves countless New Zealanders grieving but it's not marked by any kind of ritual of remembrance or period of national solidarity such as followed the loss of the Pike River miners.

We're talking about Christmas.

Over the holiday period for each of the last 10 years, an average of 17.7 people have been killed on New Zealand roads. The numbers injured are even higher - no fewer than 430. There are other ways of measuring the tragedy, too. The economic cost to the nation is huge; the impact on the lives of those directly and indirectly affected is incalculable. And it's not only Christmas.

Each of our holiday periods reaps a bitter harvest, and then there's the background toll that is taken by road accidents outside the holiday peaks every year.

The first person in New Zealand to die in a motorcar accident involving driver error was 38-year-old Janet Meikle, resident of Washdyke South, just inland from Timaru.

On the afternoon of September 8, 1906, Janet and her husband, John, were returning from a day in town, with Janet driving.

Like so many of those who die on our roads, she was regarded by those who knew her as "an expert driver". Somehow on the drive home, Janet miscalculated and clipped the bank on one side of the narrow driveway to their farm. She seemed to have lost control and the car plunged over a bank and rolled through a fence, coming to rest in the paddock below. John was thrown clear and managed to crawl his way back to the overturned car, where he found his wife pinned beneath the running board.

He told the coroner's court that he heard Janet say, "Jack, I am dying", but medical evidence was presented to the same inquiry that deemed it impossible for her to have spoken with the weight of the car across her midriff. A broken femur notwithstanding, John was able to crawl the 50m to his home where he alerted the maidservant. She fetched a man with horses who was able to pull the car upright, but it was too late for poor Janet.

Since then, more than 33,000 New Zealanders have died on the roads. We have lost more to the every day act of driving a car then we have lost in our entire military history. Whichever way you look at it, it's a national catastrophe.

But something inures us to it. It could be that it's such a mundane activity and we just accept the risks. Indeed, every mode of transport used to take its toll. Before cars came along, New Zealanders killed themselves in such numbers in boats that drowning was known as "the New Zealand death". Kiwis fell foul of horses in any number of ways, and they managed to fall off and under trams and trains with dismal regularity. To err is human, after all, and it just so happens that in many of our every day activities those little mistakes can be fatal.

But given the array of safety features in the modern car, and given the quality of New Zealand roads - our worst road would have been unimaginably luxurious to our pioneering forebears - we're running out of excuses. Mistakes - accidents - do happen. But so many of those who die on the roads each year do so as the direct result of poor judgment or outright stupidity.

Sometimes the casualty is the victim of their own miscalculation or folly; all too often, though, the victim is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The sheer numbers of New Zealanders who die on the roads, and the rate at which cyclists and pedestrians are currently being mowed down, suggests that the time is long overdue for a national recalibration of our thinking about driving. The point of driving is to get us alive and well from point A to point B. No matter how quickly or badly we want to get to point B, it cannot be worth risking our lives or those of others. Perhaps what is needed is a national day of remembrance in honour of all those who have died so needlessly on our roads.

Maybe we should observe two minutes' silence at 4pm on December 24 every year - the official start of the holiday period - and use that time to reflect on everything that we need to do to keep ourselves and others safe.

John McCrystal is a Wellington writer, and the author of 100 Years of Motoring in New Zealand.