Vision Zero: Life-saving median barriers coming to a road near you

Sunday, 16 December 2018

'You could actually reduce the road toll by about 90 per cent by doing nothing more than putting in roundabouts, median barriers and roadside fencing.'

That's the stark view of Clive Matthew-Wilson, editor of the car review website Dog And Lemon, who says the most effective ways of lowering the road toll are often the simplest ones.

'In the 1980s, there were serious accidents every week on the Auckland Harbour bridge.

'When the authorities finally put the median barrier down the centre lane of the bridge, the serious accidents basically stopped overnight and never came back.'

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The same thing happened on the Centennial Highway near Wellington, Matthew-Wilson said.

'Between 1996 and 2000, there were eight fatalities, two serious injuries and seven minor accidents on this road.

'There has not been a single death since the median barrier was installed.'

New Zealand has about 400km of median barriers (made of either wire rope, concrete or Steel W-beam), across our 94,000km of public roads.

On Sunday, the Government announced a $1.4 billion project to improve safety on New Zealand's most high-risk roads, which could prevent 160 deaths and serious injuries a year.

The Safe Network Programme will see 870 kilometres of high-volume, high-risk State Highways made safer by 2021 with improvements such as median and side barriers, rumble strips and shoulder widening. 

In New Zealand over the past decade there has been a greater focus and spend on new roads than on erecting median barriers on existing roads.

They aren't cheap, at about $2 million a kilometre, nor are they always the right solution. 

While median barriers deal with the risk posed by head-on crashes, roundabouts do the same for intersections, which are among the most dangerous places on the road network.

In 2013, the New Zealand Transport Agency released a high-risk intersection guide for councils and other road controlling authorities, noting 46 per cent of deaths and serious injuries during the previous five years had happened at intersections.

By August last year, work had started, or had been completed, on 60 of the 100 intersections the government wanted to address by 2020.

Dr David Logan, a senior research fellow at Australia's Monash University accident research centre, said in Victoria the goal was for every divided rural highway - about 400km - to have median and side wire-rope barriers by 2020.

But one of the biggest obstacles for any infrastructure was funding.

'It's easy to say we reduce deaths and serious injuries and it saves in direct and indirect costs, but unfortunately in practice there's no direct link that can be used.

'They have to spend the money putting the infrastructure in, but the benefits are not linked back to them.'

One of the tenets of New Zealand's 'Safe System' strategy, introduced in 2010, is the need to have 'forgiving roads and roadsides'.

The philosophy acknowledges that people make mistakes, but a safe system will reduce the number of resulting deaths and injuries.

But because of our relatively unsafe roads, New Zealand's road toll has not improved like other countries which use the system, such as Sweden and Australia.

Swedish traffic safety expert Lars Ekman said the barriers were a key part of the Vision Zero policy used there and in several other countries, and being considered here.

The policy states that deaths or serious injuries should not be regarded as an acceptable product of mobility. 

In Sweden, median barriers are in place on 76 per cent of the kilometres travelled by vehicles on roads with a speed limit above 80kmh.  

'An example I use a lot is the difference between traffic signals and roundabouts,' Ekman said.

'Where you have a signal-controlled intersection, you have fewer accidents. But when there is an accident, it could be at high speed with fatal consequences.

'If you have a roundabout, you have lots of accidents, but it's nearly impossible to kill anyone on a roundabout because the speeds are low and the collision angles are more favourable.'

There were many safety measures, including roundabouts, that were not extremely costly, Ekman said.

'For 10 per cent of the cost of a motorway you could make safe a stretch of road ten times as long.'

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