Editorial: Let's be careful out there

Waking to a blanket of crunchy white frost these past few mornings we've been well and truly reminded that it is, indeed, winter.
The frost extended to the footpaths and the edges of our roads, grit was sprinkled onto some roads and warning signs were put out to warn of black ice.
Unfortunately, that little ditty about driving to the conditions seems to be largely ignored.
When it rains, people seem to be in even more of a hurry than normal, rather than slowing down and one can only guess that if people can't see a hazard, they imagine there isn't one and see no need to slow down.
As the police constantly tell us, the speed limit is the fastest you can drive on any given road, it is not a target or a minimum speed at which all people must drive.
In conditions like rain and frost, we are advised to drive slower than the speed limits.
In the case of a frost, this certainly makes good sense, given that where there is white frost you can almost bet there will be black ice.
Police have attributed no less than 18 crashes in Rotorua during the weekend to icy conditions and there were several more in the Eastern Bay of Plenty and Taupo districts.
We drivers simply must learn to heed these constant warnings.
As soon as we get behind the wheel, we accept a huge responsibility to do everything within our power to take care, to stay in control of our vehicle, to keep ourselves and any other occupants in our vehicle safe and to avoid putting other road users at risk.
More often than not, crashes come down to drivers failing on one or more of those counts.
While as humans, we will always make mistakes and errors in judgment and there will always be times where accidents simply do happen, when it comes to driving conditions, if we're still doing 100km/h in torrential rain or on a frosty morning and driving as though it's a sunny, dry summer's day, whatever happens is down to us.
We put far too many lives at risk the way we drive and we simply have to learn to be more patient and careful on our often treacherous roads.