The road toll will forever fluctuate, no matter how often we push the safe driving message
Eleven people die on the roads over the four-day Easter weekend - the highest number in 17 years - and those charged with promoting road safety throw up their hands in despair, wondering what on earth more they can do to bring the road toll down.
The answer is very
little, for no one seems to take into account that there are more than half a million more people living in this country, and hundreds of thousands more motor vehicles on the roads, than there were in 1993.
So tens of thousands more drivers travelled hundreds of thousands more kilometres over the Easter break than at the corresponding time in 1993.
The Easter road toll, for all its tragedy, proves that road safety education, be it in advertising, driver training or whatever, has been, and will continue to be, something of a success.
There will always be road accidents as long as there are motor vehicles and places on which to drive them and all we can hope for is that continued reminders of the need for care will keep deaths and injuries to a minimum.
Because, as with most of what are seen as society's major problems, we don't seem able to, or don't want to, take into account human nature. And there are two beliefs hard-wired into the human psyche which defy almost every attempt at modification. The first is "I'm different"; the second is "It won't happen to me".
So there will always be people who will never accept that when they are driving a motor vehicle they are in charge of a lethal missile which, given a moment's inattention or, worse, deliberate risk-taking, will kill them and probably others in an instant.
Inspector John McClelland, of police headquarters, summed up the situation when he told Radio New Zealand that many of the Easter deaths had been preventable.
"I think there are people making bad decisions ..." he said. "There have been a few fatalities involving suspected speed and alcohol, and you know we've been pushing that for years now and people are still prepared to take the risk which is really disappointing."
But there is not a thing he or anyone else can do about that, except what is being done - constantly keeping the road safety message before the public and educating as many people as will listen to the dangers of motor vehicle misuse.
There are well over three million cars, trucks, buses and motorcycles registered in this country so the number involved in accidents, fatal or otherwise, is statistically minute. In 2008, for instance, there were 1.1 deaths and 47 injuries for every 10,000 vehicles; and 8.6 deaths and 356 injuries for every 100,000 of the population.
It doesn't help, of course, that the Government has decided to allow many-wheeled behemoths of up to 53 tonnes to take to our roads, the quality of which is well below what would be expected in other developed countries.
Human nature stands in the way, too, of all the copious efforts to deal with drink-driving, for as long as there is alcohol available some people will drink and drive, no matter how stiff the penalties or how often they are told not to do it.
But we need to remember that the number of drink-drivers, as with the number of fatalities and injuries on the roads, is statistically very low. The lowering of the blood-alcohol limit to zero for teenagers and 0.05 for adults may or may not make a difference, but it won't solve the problem.
The same goes for all the other so-called problems that various groups, government and non-government, are trying to "solve" in society.
There will always be people who murder, rape, assault and steal; who rip off social welfare and accident compensation; who smoke or who eat too much and get fat; who are careless and come to grief at work or at home; who swim beyond their capability or climb mountains too big for them or who get lost in the bush.
Anyone who thinks, for instance, that the Act-inspired "three strikes and you're out" policy will do anything to reduce the crime rate or to improve the safety of people in general is dreaming.
It will not, for the causes of increased crime and violence lie not in punishing the perpetrators or compensating their victims but in the moral and economic state of the society in which they live.
As long as there is poverty and illiteracy in a land of plenty, as long as workers are inadequately rewarded for their labours, as long as our moral fabric continues to unravel, we will continue to suffer social dysfunction increasingly.
Albert Camus, the French writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, wrote: "Even by his greatest effort man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world."
That's good enough reason to keep trying.
