Spending on roads needed to cut toll

By CATHY ARONSON transport reporter

The road toll has fallen to the point where further reductions may not be possible without drastic improvements to the roads.

But safety measures designed to help drivers to survive accidents may suffer in the competition for Government funds against plans to ease Auckland motorway congestion.

The road toll has fallen for the third successive year, reaching a record low since surveys began 38 years ago.

With one day remaining, 400 people have died this year compared with 450 last year.

The toll has declined from 650 in 1991 despite an almost 19 per cent increase in vehicles since then.

The steady drop, which began in the late 1980s, is attributed to basic safety features in cars such as seatbelts and crumple zones, advertisements and police campaigns against speed, drink driving, unsafe cars and unlicensed drivers.

It has reached the point, says Land Transport Safety Authority director David Wright, where New Zealand needs to follow the lead of top-performing countries and shift the focus from drivers to roads.

"We need to create a roading environment where crashes are survivable, thus eliminating death and serious injury."

Roads should be engineered so crashes are survivable.

"We can have the most police on our roads, the best-educated drivers and the safest cars in the world and we'll still have carnage if the roads themselves aren't designed and built with safety in mind from the start."

Transit New Zealand's national highways manager, Rick van Barneveld, says roads are being made safer but money is needed to fix bendy and bumpy stretches and remove roadside hazards.

The likelihood of death in an accident can be reduced by putting barriers on road edges, filling in ditches, widening water tables, trimming banks and removing powerpoles and big trees.

But in the past few years the chance of crashing into a hazard has increased.

With the Government focusing on eliminating congestion, cash to fix existing roads has almost halved in the past three years to $35 million.

Transit's annual highways audit showed problems with bumpy and winding roads, narrow bridges and poor intersections.

It approved up to $2 million to urgently remove some hazards early in the New Year, with proposals to allocate $5 million each year for the same work.

Transit plans to spend part of the money next year to put in wire median barriers on highways awaiting major overhauls to four lanes, including a 10km stretch of the Waikato Expressway between Long Swamp and Rangiriri, and Haywood Hills on State Highway 58 in Wellington.

How Transit's $600 million in state highways funds will be allocated next year will be decided by roading authorities before March for consideration by the country's road funder, Transfund.

Transfund is largely guided by the Crown's objectives, and although the Government acknowledged the importance of engineering in its recent Road Safety Strategy for 2010, most of the $34 million finance package for next year went into education and enforcement.

The Automobile Association agrees that "failsafe" roads must be created now, and public affairs director George Fairbairn says this could be achieved by using all petrol tax for road maintenance.

The AA says creating more passing lanes and ensuring there are no ditches right on the edge of roads could help to make them safer.

- additional reporting: Natasha Harris

Herald feature: Cutting the road toll

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