New Zealand has one of the worst road safety records in the developed world. But we struggle to recognise what that says about our cars, our roads, our road rules and our driving. Simon Wilson reports.
Let’s start with motorbikes. In the 12 months to October last year, four times as many bike riders were killed or seriously injured on Auckland roads as in the previous year. The spike was nationwide, but worst in the big city.
No, they weren’t tearing up the motorway at 160km/h. Nor were they riding in convoy or weaving through the other traffic or running red lights.
As Auckland Transport (AT) executive Stacey Van Der Putten told the Herald in November, the spike came between 3pm and 6pm. Mostly, she said, it involved what traffic authorities call a “turn event”. This is where another driver doesn’t see the bike and turns across the traffic, hitting them.
There’s a lot to unpick in this. Turn events, in the hours from school run to home time: that points pretty clearly to inattention by car drivers.
You’re grumpy because congestion. Grumpy because kids in the back. Grumpy because you’ve had a day.
You’re on the phone. Just quickly, to fix the GPS, change the music, take the work call, negotiate who’s cooking dinner.
You spot the gap behind that ute, but you don’t spot the bike, don’t see until too late that it wasn’t a gap at all.
It shouldn’t be a surprise. Since Covid there are more motorbikes on our roads. And studies around the world suggest inattention contributes to about a third of serious crashes and about 80 per cent of all crashes.
Inattention is not something “bad drivers” do. We’re all capable of it. We’ve all had near misses; for some, it wasn’t a miss. Probably, every driver knows how true this is.
Sure, those fools who drink, tailgate, speed and pass on blind corners - they’re “bad drivers” and they cause crashes. But everyone can make a mistake, and being trained or experienced doesn’t make you immune.
ROAD SAFETY is not what it used to be and the biggest changes have happened just in the past 10 years.
We know modern cars are “better”: they’re bigger, stronger and stuffed with airbags and electronics to keep us safe. SUVs and double cab utes, commonly built on a light-truck chassis, dominate new car sales.
This is true for conventionally powered vehicles and EVs alike. The EVs, with their large batteries, are even heavier than their petrol-fuelled counterparts.
But those big vehicles pose risks for everyone else. Last year in Auckland, deaths and serious injuries to people hit by a vehicle accounted for 46 per cent of all major crash victims.
This means road safety is no longer largely about keeping people safe in a car. It’s also about keeping people safe from cars.
This is why, in the suburbs, many intersections have been made safer for everyone, while traffic-calming measures like raised pedestrian “tables” are designed to slow everyone down. To make the streets safer for pedestrians.
It’s also why we have lower speed limits on many roads, and why new open roads have wide shoulders and median and side barriers. All these things are highly effective in preventing the horrors of a head-on collision with another car or a tree.
DESPITE THE improvements, though, our road toll is rising.
This is new. Until 2013, the rate was falling: that year, a record low in recent decades, 253 people died on our roads.
Then it started to rise, faster than the rate of population growth. It fell again during the pandemic but now it’s climbing again. In 2022, 374 people died on our roads.
This is not a condition of modern life. It’s not normal. It’s an aberration specific to this country.
In 2016, New Zealand had the third-highest rate of road deaths in the developed world. Only Poland and Greece were worse.
We have seven deaths per 1000 people, but in Australia it’s five, and falling. The death rate in France and Italy - countries many New Zealanders like to think are full of bad drivers - is only 75 per cent of ours.
In Denmark, which has about the same number of people and cars, the rate is half ours.
There’s no single reason for this, but three factors do stand out. We have more cars, we use our phones all the time, and we have struggled to grasp the value of the Road to Zero approach to road safety.
In 2014, there were 3.6 million licensed vehicles in New Zealand. In 2023, that had grown to 4.5 million. There are about 4.2 million people of driving age in this country; we now have more cars than drivers.
And they’re everywhere. We drive all the time. Short trips that used to involve a walk, like nipping to the dairy or picking up the kids, are done by car. A third of all our car trips are shorter than 2km.
We commute by car, telling ourselves it’s more convenient than public transport, even as we sit there, stuck in traffic. And we pack the roads over summer.
More cars means more danger, but at the same time we resist the idea things are different now and we need new ways to manage that danger. We think, shouldn’t we just be free to drive, like in the old days?
And mobile phones? They’re a big threat because, like cars, we use them all the time too.
Phones are different from other distractions. We can drive with the radio on, because our brains prioritise the risks on the road. But when we use the phone, we go into a “phone zone”. We stop paying attention to other things, even though we think we’re still alert.
You can test this without having to get in a car. Say something important to a friend while they’re texting. Count the seconds while they go “Mmm?” and carry on texting.
As for Road to Zero, or Vision Zero as it’s called by Auckland Transport, the programme has been widely scoffed at on talkback radio and elsewhere. But it works, as the data from Europe, America and elsewhere makes very clear. Where Road to Zero campaigns have been embraced by the population, the rate of deaths and serious injuries has fallen.
In some places, the results have been spectacular. The New Jersey town of Hoboken, across the Hudson River from New York, adopted a Vision Zero strategy in 2017. A courageous mayor dropped the urban speed limit to 20mph (32km/h), got the pedestrian crossings redesigned and put bike lanes into almost half the streets.
In six years, no deaths. Injuries down by 41 per cent.
Road to Zero means recognising that everyone makes mistakes, so we need the roads and their users to be safer, in rural areas and in cities. That includes improvements to road design, more enforcement of the road rules and lower speeds wherever the dangers of going fast are too high.
Fundamentally, it means social acceptance that having people die in crashes is unacceptable, so we have to change the way we use the roads.
Why is there so much opposition to this in New Zealand? Why do we treat “drive to the conditions” as a licence to go as fast as we’re allowed?
“Zero” is heroically aspirational, but we have zero tolerance for murder, too, and no one thinks that’s wrong. On the contrary, it’s generally regarded as the only acceptable policy.
Road to Zero is not an attack on the 110km/h limits on some new expressways. But it does address the driving conditions on many “normal” open roads and in built-up areas.
SPEED WAS a factor in 68 per cent of serious crashes in Auckland this year; alcohol or other drugs featured in 34 per cent.
Speed is important for several reasons. You have less control when you’re driving fast and less time to react when something goes wrong. Because of these things, it’s more likely even a little mistake will cause a crash.
And if you’re speeding, that crash will do more damage.
The risk grows sharply. Researchers at the World Bank have shown that if you hit a pedestrian while driving at 30km/h, they have a 90 per cent chance of survival. That drops to less than 50 per cent if you’re doing 50km/h. At 80km/h, the chances of their survival are 10 per cent.
This correlation of speed to deaths isn’t disputed. The science is settled and it’s supported by New Zealand data. Auckland Transport lowered speed limits on some roads in 2020. After two years, there had been a 39.8 per cent reduction in deaths on those roads.
This data has been criticised, because those were the lockdown years. But the figure relates to lower-speed sites compared to control sites where there were no speed-limit reductions in the same period.
When these results were announced, AT’s chief executive at the time, Shane Ellison, said, “The evidence tells us that the faster you go, the more likely you are to make an error, and the heavier the consequences that people pay”.
SPEED LIMITS pose a significant test for the new transport minister, Simeon Brown.
In recent years NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi has lowered speed limits from 100km/h to 80km/h on 4 per cent of the highways. Auckland Transport and several councils have also reduced limits on some of the roads they control. More reductions are planned.
Under the National-Act coalition agreement, however, the Government will ”reverse speed limit reductions where it is safe to do so”.
There’s been no explanation yet of what “safe to do so” means. After all, the limits were reduced because the roads were deemed unsafe at the old speeds. And the evidence does seem clear that lives have been saved because of it.
Two weeks before Christmas, Brown announced he was cancelling the “mandatory requirements for road controlling authorities to implement speed management plans”. This was intended as a “first step” to reversing lower speed limits introduced under Road to Zero.
“This will allow work to begin on a new rule to ensure that when speed limits are set, economic impacts - including travel times – and the views of road users and local communities are taken into account, alongside safety,” he added.
There’s no evidence to suggest lower speed limits have undermined economic efficiency, especially as crashes cost not only pain and suffering, but a lot of money.
Brown did not instruct roading authorities to restore speed limits to their earlier levels, or to stop planning any further reductions. He simply said they could. At this point, the power to do it is theirs, not his.
What was the minister’s aim, making this announcement just before the busy holiday season? He cannot be intending to signal to motorists that it’s okay to speed.
But as the AA’s road safety spokesman Dylan Thomsen said about this policy when it was proposed back in March, “if the speed reductions aren’t happening, what are we going to see instead to try and make our roads safer?”
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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