Police at the scene of a fatal accident on State Highway 3 SH3 at Te Awa. Photo / Mike Scott
A change in culture has been highlighted as one of the biggest things needed to fix our persistently high road toll.
While 2023 saw a dip in the number of road fatalities – 340, down from 374 in 2022 – New Zealand is a long way from achieving the “Road to Zero” campaign.
And 2024 is not tracking any better. 36 people died on the roads in January, an increase from the previous, while the Easter road toll was the worst since 2021.
Just this week, five people died after a head-on collision near Hamilton on Tuesday afternoon.
Speaking to The Front Page, AA road safety spokesman Dylan Thomsen said that New Zealand has not made any progress on its road toll in a decade.
“Essentially when you factor in the population increase that we’ve had and the increase in driving and travel on our roads because of having more people, we’ve just really stayed at the same amount of road deaths and serious injuries for the last 10 years, which is a tragic figure,” Thomsen said.
“In my view, New Zealand’s already a very bad country in terms of road safety performance. We’re one of the worst in the OECD. You can talk about specific numbers of 373 people died this year, or 340 than the next year, or things like that, but I prefer to look at that longer term trend.”
The Government has promised more drug and alcohol testing as one solution, and Thomsen said that is something the AA has wanted to see more of for some time.
“If you look at 2022, which is the year that we’ve got complete data for, we had about 48 percent of all of our road deaths involved either alcohol or drugs. So 178 of the people who lost their lives that year, the crash involved a driver or rider, um, with, who was drunk or, or drugged. That is a huge proportion of our road toll. We need to see more enforcement to help change that.”
Improving the quality of roads is another area the Government wants to address. Thomsen said that that can’t be fixed quickly, but it needs to be looked at, particularly potholes.
“When people are hitting potholes or swerving to avoid potholes, there is the risk of them losing control of the vehicle if they’ve hit a pothole or just crossing the centre line or going off the shoulder of the road and then losing control with things like that.”
Above all other improvements though, Thomsen said one thing that needs to be looked at is the ‘she’ll be alright’ attitude Kiwi drivers have when driving.
“We have too many people still in New Zealand these days who just don’t really think or appreciate the risks and the consequences on the roads. For just about all of us, it’s the riskiest thing we will do every day, and yet we barely give it a second thought.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more about what improvements and changes need to be made to tackle our high road toll.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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