Miserly approach to roading costs lives

By GEORGE FAIRBAIRN*

The public could be forgiven for wondering if the long-awaited 2010 road safety strategy has been lost in the mists of the transport funding crisis that now seems to be enveloping the Government.

Although the first consultation documents appeared in October 2000, the strategy appears to be no closer to being released. There is not even an indication of when it may emerge.

The main objective of the strategy is to reduce the annual road toll to 300 from its current level of 403.

The problem for the Government is that to be credible the strategy must call for more funding to make our roads permanently safer, because road factors are now the third most important factor in open-road deaths.

Unfortunately, the 10-year draft Transit state highway programme has already revealed that the Government's cupboard is bare, to the tune of at least $1.2 billion. Moreover, to the ire of provincial New Zealand, the Government's main focus in land transport appears to be solving Auckland's congestion problem.

There can be no doubt that this needs to be solved, and solved quickly given the rapid growth in the city's vehicle fleet - growth which, despite what some may think, is clearly more a function of population than the provision or otherwise of roads.

But Auckland's congestion is no reason to knowingly condemn people in other parts of the country to roads which are demonstrably unsafe. No matter how thinly the Government tries to slice up the meagre pie it has traditionally served up to roading, somewhere some part of the network is left wanting.

To give some indication of how wanting road funding is under current allocations, the Government will pay for roads only where the cost to the community of not doing the construction is six times greater than the cost of doing the construction.

In other words, if the community were in some way able to pool all the costs it accumulated in lost time, accidents and lost lives in a year, it could pay for the construction of the replacement route six times over. Previously that ratio was four times, while in many other countries the ratio only needs to be two to set bulldozers rolling.

For example, consider a road which averages one vehicle passing every seven seconds of every hour of every day of the year. In Australia, a road with this sort of traffic would automatically qualify for four-laning with a median barrier down the middle. Not so here.

In New Zealand we have to wait, and if enough people are killed and the traffic count increases, such a road may be four-laned. This is because New Zealand spends less than half the proportion of its gross domestic product on roading (0.9 per cent) than Australia (2 per cent).

This is not to forget that the money needed for this work all comes from petrol taxes and road-user charges in the first place. Of the 42 cents-a-litre collected in taxes and levies on petrol, the equivalent of only 10 cents is allocated to new road projects, while 22 cents is siphoned off to the Crown Account.

The remainder, plus that gained from road-user charges and vehicle registration, is spent on maintenance. Of the 4.7 cents added to the price of petrol last year, only 1 cent ended up being spent on new road construction; the rest went on maintenance cost increases and other objectives.

To date the Government's main approach to road safety has been to spend $12 million on advertising and invest more on a highway patrol that is issuing the more and more infringement notices required to bring in fines revenue. From the Government's viewpoint, policing pays.

It has even mooted reducing the drink-driving limit despite clear evidence that lower levels of blood-alcohol are not particularly significant in causing accidents.

In fact, by far the bulk of fatal accidents occur when vehicles fail to take a bend, or cross the centre-line even though they are not overtaking. In other words, if the line of paint down the middle of the road were a little bit more solid, we might save the strategy's target of 100 fewer people killed on the roads each year.

In many ways it seems highly anomalous that the ACC, which is increasing petrol prices later this year by 3 cents a litre, has accumulated a $600 million fund invested in stocks and bonds to pay for the care of victims of road accidents.

Spending on a network of routes with wire median barriers, wider roads and passing lanes, as used successfully in Sweden, would be a better investment in fencing at the top of the cliff than a shiny ambulance at the bottom.

It also seems odd that the Land Transport Management Bill has been designed to tie up even more funding in consultation and red tape. There is no way private roading investors can ever make money from public safety, but they can make money by helping us to alleviate congestion.

The more money the private sector puts into solving congestion, the more public sector money is left over for road safety. This is not to say that every toll route is welcome but merely to demonstrate that every bit helps.

Unfortunately, over the years we seem to have developed an industry of people who profit either monetarily or politically from wasting road construction funds with ever more elaborate systems of objection and consultation. It can take up to 12 years to build a road in an urban area. All this costs money, and it is money that cannot be spent on saving lives.

It has been calculated that congestion in Auckland costs the country $1 billion a year, while the cost of road accidents is more than $3 billion. This does not mean one is more important than the other; both are important costs.

The Land Transport Management Bill has offered no real help in addressing these needs. Perhaps the 2010 road safety strategy will. We await its release with interest.

* George Fairbairn is the Automobile Association's public affairs director.

Herald Feature: Cutting the road toll