Editorial: Time to resolve to reverse road toll trend - Hawke's Bay Today

The road toll for 2018 was 380, the highest in a decade. Photo / File

Make no mistake, if there's one resolution everyone should be making it is that they will do all they can to reverse the upward trend of the road toll.

The total for 2018 was 380, the highest in a decade, 50 per cent up on the 2013 total, the lowest in more than 60 years.

For comparison's sake, the record of 843 was in 1973, and the record low is, as it always will be, is zero, the toll for each of the first three years after the importing of two Benz automobiles in 1898, regarded as the first motor vehicles on New Zealand roads.

The Christmas-New Year holiday road toll of nine is among the lowest of the past 60 years.

The first fatality New Zealand was said to have involving a motor vehicle was when Claude Smith was thrown from his horse-drawn trap when the animal was startled by an oncoming car in Christchurch in 1902.

A motorcyclist died in an incident with a train in Dunedin in 1905, and a South Canterbury farmer's wife died when the car she was driving crashed in 1906, precipitating the escalation as vehicle numbers increased over the years.

The toll first passed 100 when 125 deaths were recorded in 1925, and it was just five years later that it passed 200 — 246 in 1930 as vehicle numbers in New Zealand doubled in about five years, from about 70,000 to more than 150,000.

The toll passed 300, with 313 in 1953, and 11 years later the milestone of 400 was passed with 428 in 1964, beginning, like so many vehicles, to accelerate out of control.

It was the very next year that 500 was passed with 559 deaths in 1965, 600 was passed with 655 in 1970, 700 was passed with 713 in 1972, and just the next year that New Zealand set its tragic record. The toll had more than doubled in 10 years.

If we're going for the record, there is only one that is worth going for, that magical zero.

The most common contributing factors have changed over the 120 years since William McLean imported his Benz, whether it be speeds, alcohol, the increasing number of vehicles on the roads, and road engineering.

Add to them any number of distractions, including cellphones, drinking coffee on the go or munching takeaways at the wheel, or such mishaps as bumble bees or wasps nipping up the trouser leg of the driver at the wheel.

That leads to the one constant. The greater the number of vehicles on the road, and the greater the number of distractions, the greater the risk, and the less room for error.

The simple fact is that whenever there is a fatality on New Zealand roads, it will be because someone, somehow, somewhere, has made a mistake.