Editorial: Crashes avoidable but inevitable

The Bay's fatality-free Easter holiday period distorts the wider picture, writes Mark Story. Photo / File

Many have found comfort in the fact our region boasted another fatality-free Easter holiday period.

But this has to be tempered with the fact six people died on New Zealand roads during the same holiday - three times as many as last year.

National manager for road policing Superintendent Steve Greally is labelling the number of deaths that occurred on our roads over the holiday period "particularly tragic".

Assistant Commissioner for Road Policing Sandra Venables weighed in with "crashes are preventable".

Yes, but with the great freedom to travel easily and swiftly comes the risk of a swift end.

That's the trade-off motorists face. The question is how many deaths can we live with?

The human condition is too fallible to expect zero tragedy.

This was the highest Easter toll in eight years; the highest was 21, in 1971.

Our holiday periods, whether it be Christmas, Easter, Queen's Birthday or the like, tend to be defined by these ensuing ghoulish stats.

They're a gauge of grief. We seem intensely fascinated with how many people die during holiday periods.

And so we should, but maybe we need to widen the investigative proposition a little.

Many of us travelled by car to hide chocolate eggs somewhere else this past weekend, and I'd hazard many ventured to regions outside our own.

So, falling back on our home region's clean bill of health is nothing other than a cold-comfort, and should be seen as a little shortsighted, if not insular.

We should focus less on regional scorecards and more on our national scourge.