EDITORIAL: Let your lights shine for all to see

Louis Pierard
IN south Waikato a sequence of road signs exhorts drivers to slow down, to keep their distance and to pull over if they are feeling tired. They are a result of a South Waikato and Taupo initiative by Transit New Zealand, Police, Land Transport New Zealand, South Waikato and Taupo District Councils, Environment Waikato and ACC to reduce the cut of fatalities and injuries crashes on that section of SH1.
They will, it is hoped, help the Government meet its nationwide goals of achieving no more than 300 fatalities and no more than 4500 hospital admissions a year by 2010.
The signs' contemoorary messages target the top six, key crash factors identified in crash analyses and are changed at three-monthly intervals "to maintain motorists' interest".
It may be because the busy route is so frequently travelled, which encourages a potentially disastrous over-familiarity that such "sound-bite" correctives are necessary. Or perhaps they are there just to pique the interest of grammarians.
Nevertheless in a world in which mushrooming signage jostles everywhere for attention, one wonders whether those safety messages can ever really be effective. It is no simple matter to measure whether the signs encourage tailgaters to back off or the leaden footed to slow down or if dozy drivers don't just nod past the signs and miraculously make it to their destinations without killing anyone. Then, perhaps anything's better than nothing at all.
Nevertheless, there is one sign in that sequence whose effects can be measured easily: It recommends drivers turn on their headlights at all times so they can be seen.
If ever there was a good advice treated with contempt, it is that inspired suggestion. On a recent trip to Hamilton, late in the morning, I made a point of counting the number of drivers who might have been impressed by that sign: Only one vehicle in 25 had its lights on.
How can the benefits of such a simple safety measure be so comprehensively rejected? What could be simpler than turning on one's lights?
If thrift forbids (and that, surely, can be the only reason), the most miserly driver should be easily persuaded that the additional outlay on a minuscule amount of fuel - ideally used to power purpose-designed daytime running lights - gives enormous value.
Some drivers, especially those in dark-coloured vehicles, can't even be persuaded to turn on their lights when marginal conditions make them virtually invisible. (Strangely, the delusion still persists that parking lights have any effect).
Daytime headlights are an insurance policy against inattention and inadvertency. The fleeting prominence strong lights can give an approaching vehicle can be the difference between life and death.