It's a simple message, that sometimes struggles to resonate. Photo / NZME
Hawke's Bay Today reporter Doug Laing reflects on the tragedy of the 2019 road toll and accident trends in the past 30 years
Hawke's Bay has had its worst road toll in almost a decade and Napier its worst in at least 30 years despite a nationwide decline in the number of tragedies over the last 12 months.
While the provisional nationwide toll of 353 is 3.5 percent down on last year's toll of 375, the toll across the five local authority areas from Wairoa to Tararua is up by five to 24, the worst since the 27 in 2010.
The Ministry of Transport provisionally records the number of fatalities within the urban and rural boundaries of Napier City in 2019 at 10, double that of the of any year since 2010, and one more than the previous 30-year high of nine in 1992.
It is the second year in a row that the Napier toll has been higher than that of the Hastings District, something which otherwise hadn't happened in the last three decades, which opened in sesqi-centennial celebration year 1990 when Hastings had a toll of 26 in a not-to-be-celebrated nationwide horror of 729 fatalities.
There have been 446 deaths on Hawke's Bay roads in the two decades since the start of the new millennium.
The highest annual toll nationwide was 843 in 1973, when the toll in Hawke's Bay was about 60, including the first road fatality I'd covered, a sole occupant killed when his car rolled during the night on State Highway 2 near Te Hauke.
In the wreck were the telltale indicators of a night out — an empty beer bottle or two and scattered chips and other takeaway remnants not uncommon to crash scenes in the first few years of the later-closing booze barns and nightspots post the barrooms' Six O'Clock Swill which had ended in 1967.
At the end of July that year, just four weeks after I started at the Central Hawke's Bay Press, now long-gone but at the time published daily Monday-Friday in Waipukurau, I covered the annual meeting of the Central Hawke's Bay Road Safety Committee at which Ministry of Transport regional superintendent Ken Boyden said:
"We appear to have become punch-drunk to accident statistics. Every month 68 people are killed, on the average, on New Zealand roads, and no-one turns a hair. We just accept it."
Waipukurau Hospital, now also long-gone, had had 70 admissions of "road accidents victims" in the last year, averaging more than 10 days each, said Boyden.
Boyden, who died in 2010, had grown-up in England where at the age of 19 he had been conscripted into the Royal Engineers and became part of the World War II allied force that landed on the beaches of Normandy in 1944.
He came to New Zealand in 1955 to work in his uncle's road contracting business in Napier, but the weight of the bitumen tolled and he became an investigator with the Wellington City Traffic Department, but moving to concentrate most of the career on road safety.
He appeared in despair in 1973 as he told the Waipukurau audience: "It appears that human life is precious no more. We must get our heads out of the sand and get tuned into deadly rhythm of the rod toll."
While the figures are nothing like those of 1973, when the population was under 3 million (compared with the latest estimate of 4.95 million), the latest Hawke's Bay tragedies were part of an horrific year in which the toll across the central North Island areas of Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Taranaki, Manawatu, Wanganui, Gisborne and Hawke's Bay, was more than half the nationwide toll, up from 48.3 per cent in 2018, and 39.4 per cent in 2017. It had been just over 47 per cent in both 2015 and 2016.
The worst were in the equivalent of a Bermuda Triangle — Tokoroa-Taupo-Rotorua, which on April 28 included a head on State Highway 1 crash near Atiamuri which claimed eight lives, including a mum and dad and their five children from Napier.
As a single-incident of nuclear-family loss (parents and their children) it was possibly unprecedented in New Zealand, not even in such disasters as the Mt Erebus airline crash in 1979 or the Hawke's Bay earthquake in 1931.
Just four weeks before the April 28 crash five members of another family had died when a vehicle hit a tree on a rural road near Atiamuri, and five tourists were killed when a bus rolled on State Highway 5 west of Rotorua in September.
The reality is the swathe of New Zealand bounded by Waikato incorporates the country's busiest stretches of provincial highway - all of state highways 3 and 5, the bulk of SH2, and the highest-risk stages of North Island SH1, about 2000km in all and mostly without median or side barriers.
While excessive speed and alcohol were clearly significant factors in 1973 when the tragedies were referred to as "accidents", and remain factors in today's "crashes" by nature of usually being able to be clearly identified by evidence.
Less identifiable is "distraction", because of a lack evidence, except in the case of cellphone use while at the wheel, the time and duration of calls being seemingly given even greater credibility as proof of driving miscreance than DNA does in solving homicide inquiries.
At least a third of the fatalities in Hawke's Bay this year involved the sole occupant or user of a vehicle in mainly single-vehicle crashes, with little evidence left behind to indicate whether they were changing the volume, stretching for the coffee bought a few minutes earlier at fuel stop's coffee station, or trying to avoid a cat on the road.
Among the distractions is fatigue, and while distractions have increased, so too have obstacles, such as the amount of traffic and the nature of it, including vehicles operated by inexperienced drivers, including teenagers on "learner" licences and tourists used to driving on the other side of the road, or in conditions quite alien from the turning and comparatively narrow highways of the tourism hinterland, such as Rotorua and Taupo.
By far the greater proportion of fatal crashes in Hawke's Bay occur in the hours of daylight, and nationwide the age group 40-59 years is now losing more lives than any other significant age group.
Up to Monday this week 113 in that age group had died, which compared with 85 aged 0-24 years and 71 aged 25-39. In 2017, there were 92 deaths in the 40-59 age-group, compared with 92 aged 0-24 and 102 aged 25-39.
Government holiday-season duty Minister Ian Lees-Galloway said road safety will remain a priority for the Government, with the introduction of the 10-year strategy Road to Zero, committing a 25 per cent greater budget to roading and road safety, at $1 billion a year, and an aim of reducing crash deaths and injuries by 40 per cent by the year 2030.
It includes side and median crash barriers and other safety measures on about 3000km of "high-risk" state highway, and also focuses on other safety upgrades, safer speed limits, driver training and impaired driving.
Associate Minister of Transport Julie Anne Genter says it would save 750 lives and prevent 5600 serious injuries over the next decade.
Meanwhile, the provisional 2019 road toll in Australia was 1182, up 47 from the previous year. New Zealand's toll exceeded by one Australia's highest state toll of 352 in New South Wales, which has a population more than 50 per cent greater than New Zealand. Other state tolls in Australia were: Victoria 263, Queensland 217, West Australia 164, South Australia 113, Northern Territory 35, Tasmania 32 and Australian Capital Territory 6.
'The twinkling fires dotted north and south as far as Te Awanga was magical.'