It means understanding that the human body has a limited ability to withstand crash forces, and it calls on vehicle manufacturers, road designers and road users to share the responsibility for managing crash forces to levels that don't result in death or serious injury.
Vehicle technology and road engineering does save lives.
That's why the NZTA promotes the purchase of vehicles with electronic stability control and airbags as part of our advertising campaigns, and it's why we're investing in things like median barriers and roadside rumble strips to prevent serious crashes or reduce their severity. But technology doesn't work in isolation.
We need safer cars, safer roads, safer speeds and safer drivers.
Technology and road safety education aren't opposing forces: to help people make the most out of safety technology we also need to influence the right behaviour.
It could be said that driving is the ultimate interface between human behaviour and technology.
Our choice isn't whether to improve one or the other. It's how to strengthen both of them and make them work better together.
Mr Mathew-Wilson says that most of the improvements in people's driving behaviour are the result of major changes in social attitudes towards risk taking. We couldn't agree more. Consider the use of safety belts.
The safety belts themselves are a form of technology, but people choosing to use them is a behaviour.
The technology alone is useless without the right behaviour. More people are choosing to wear safety belts now than ever before.
This change in behaviour did not happen by magic. It has been brought about and entrenched by decades of concentrated effort.
The same goes for drink driving, speeding, and other behaviours that road safety efforts have helped to change.
Mr Mathew-Wilson also refers to "pointless" police enforcement, singling out speed enforcement for special criticism.
He may wish to reflect on the case reported earlier this month of a 45-year-old woman pulled over on SH1 near Foxton for speeding. She was not swerving or driving erratically, but she was exceeding the speed limit by 18km/h.
When the highway patrol officer pulled the vehicle over at 4pm, he discovered that the driver was also intoxicated, and had been drinking wine from a sports bottle while driving from Taranaki to Lower Hutt. She admitted that she'd been drinking since 11.30 that morning. And she was carrying two young children under the age of four in the car.
The actions of police quite possibly saved the lives of those children and other innocent road users. This is why most New Zealanders strongly support the efforts of police to keep our roads safe by targeting speed, drink and drugged-driving and other behaviour that puts us all at risk.
It's also worth pointing out that while Mr Mathew-Wilson frequently dismisses road safety advertising as a waste of money, before the introduction of the recent changes to New Zealand's give way rules, he loudly criticised the Government for not doing enough advertising.
While news media are understandably drawn to stories about new and innovative road safety advertisements, witness the Ghost Chips phenomenon, we have always gone to great pains to explain that road safety advertising is only one small (but important) piece of a broad and wide-ranging effort to bring down the road toll.
For every dollar the government spends on national road safety advertising, we invest roughly $20 on police enforcement and around $50 on building and maintaining safer and more forgiving roads.
We need to make our transport system safer on all fronts, and we need to use every proven technique available to us. Those of us involved in the effort to save lives and prevent serious injuries on the road have shifted our thinking in order to do that.
Geoff Dangerfield is chief executive of the NZ Transport Agency and a member of cross-government National Road Safety Committee.
