'Reckless behaviour' causes half of fatal and serious road crashes, AA report finds
Tuesday, 27 March 2018
'Reckless behaviour' caused half of New Zealand's fatal and serious injury crashes, an AA report has found. But the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) says blame won't fix our abysmal road toll statistics.
The AA Research Foundation-commissioned study issued on Tuesday analysed 300 passenger vehicle crashes, including drink-driving and speeding, acknowledged that even responsible drivers occasionally made mistakes.
About three quarters of the serious injury crashes studied involved drivers who were generally obeying the road rules but crashed after making a mistake.
The NZTA urged drivers and roading agencies to consider the 'bigger picture' to 'collectively to make our system safer'.
**READ MORE:
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* Can we stop saying 'road toll'?**
NZTA safety and environment director Harry Wilson said the report confirmed 'the need to create a safe transport system which accommodates for human error so that simple mistakes don't result in avoidable deaths and injuries on our roads'.
The 'safe system' approach to reducing deaths and serious injuries on New Zealand roads had four 'pillars' – safe roads and roadsides, safe vehicles, safe speeds and safe road use, Wilson said.
'We're working to make improvements in all of those areas, and we hope this new report will help to broaden the road safety conversation beyond questions of 'who was at fault' in a crash.'
Road safety critic and car review website Dog and Lemon Guide's editor Clive Matthew-Wilson agreed with the NZTA, but said fixing dangerous roads 'should be the Government's top priority'.
'We have to get over this idea of creating perfect drivers. What we need is perfect cars and perfect roads,' he said.
New Zealand's road toll could be halved in three years 'simply by modifying roads', Matthew-Wilson said.
New Zealand has always had 'tired drivers, idiot drivers, and drunk drivers', he said.
'Idiots are idiots. We're not going to change their behaviour. What we need to do is change the roads and the cars so that idiot behaviour doesn't result in unnecessary fatalities.'
The reason the road toll had been gradually dropping since the late 1980s was because of better roads, better cars, and better medical attention, he said.
Simple safety measures like median barriers significantly reduced the number of serious crashes, he said.
Median barriers could have prevented 12 road deaths within a 10-day period this month, according to a Dog and Lemon Guide release published on March 21.
They 'would probably be alive if the roads had been fitted with median barriers,' the release said.
While Matthew-Wilson said he appreciated that the police have a job to do, the past 10 years of heavy enforcement of speed laws had not lowered the road toll.
'What does work is safer cars, safer roads, and a police presence that reminds motorists that they need to behave,' he said.
Police would continue to focus on altering driving behaviour.
National road policing manager Superintendent Steve Greally said police were 'working hard' to contribute to the safe system by encouraging safer road use through prevention and enforcement.
People should wear their seatbelts and not speed, he said.
'We know people can mistakes when they're driving, that's why we ask them to make good decisions to start with, to lessen the impact of mistakes,' he said.
'Quite simply, less speed means less harm.'