Editorial - Tuesday December 3, 2013

Peter Jackson, editor, The Northland Age

THE kids at Pamapuria School know absolutely nothing about the process that must be followed to gazette a reduced speed limit on the open road. Hopefully they never will. It would be much better, for them and everyone else in times to come, if they stick with the simple, childish logic that they displayed last week.

How much better off would we all be if this country showed a preference for childish logic than the tortuous, brain-numbing bureaucracy that seems to thwart every attempt to resolve what is often a very simple issue? Like slowing traffic on a state highway outside a school?

The strange thing is that the powers that make life so complicated do recognise the danger of open road speed limits in the vicinity of schools. Students at urban schools from one end of the country to the other are now protected by morning and afternoon speed restrictions, from 50km/h to 40, but pupils whose schools are out of town presumably don't need such protection, even if electronic signs have been erected in some locations, including Pamapuria, to warn drivers that they are entering a school zone, and presumably should take extra care.

There is no requirement for them to reduce their speed though. The logic seems to be that keeping an eye out for children while travelling at 100km/h will do the trick.

Pamapuria has long had an issue with the traffic that zips past all day every day, but those concerns were raised many more notches last week when two cars collided outside the school, the driver of one dying at the scene after his vehicle rolled six or eight times, flinging debris in all directions as it did so. The vehicle came to rest on its roof just a few metres from the school fence. A sturdy fence it is too, albeit unlikely to stop a tumbling four-wheel-drive.

The collision occurred as the driver of the other car turned right into the school bus bay, at around 3pm, just as the school day was ending. Children could well have been congregating very close to the scene, and the four-wheel-drive could well have hit them. This accident, tragic as it was for one man and his family, could well have been calamitous. Multiple young lives might have been lost had the collision occurred a split second earlier, or if the physics involved from that point on had differed minutely.

Does that mean the speed limit on the section of highway outside the school will be reduced now? Not likely. The process that has to be followed, if anyone has the wit to initiate it, probably means that most of the kids who might have died on Tuesday last week will be parents themselves before anything happens. The kids clearly don't understand that. Nor do their parents or teachers. And they should refuse to accept it.

No one has suggested that the driver who died was travelling at an excessive speed. That will no doubt come out in the course of the police investigation, but more than one Pamapuria pupil pointed out last week that drivers don't have to break the law to endanger lives. The gazetted speed limit of 100km/h was too fast, according to some of the placards the kids made, and it is. The kids can see that. Their teachers and parents can see that. So why can't the people who make the rules on speed limits?

More common sense was on display at Pamapuria School on Friday than would be exhibited by your average bureaucrat in a lifetime. The children will grow to understand what the adults who supported them already know though, that there is no place in this world for common sense, and that, like all good things, sensible solutions to obvious problems take time.

Imagine the scramble that would be happening now if multiple children had died on Tuesday November 26. Imagine the outpouring of sympathy, from the Prime Minister's office down. Imagine the speed with which the bureaucratic wheels would be turning to make some effort to avoid a similar tragedy in the future. And ask yourself who it is who is standing in the way of doing something now, rather than waiting for a disaster.

The last one's not easy to answer. Every party in this sort of situation says their hands are tied by someone else. No one will say Pamapuria School can't have a speed restriction because they say so. What you tend to get is mumblings along the lines of, 'If it was up to me ... '

A few years ago a family living on a short council road north of Waiharara came to this newspaper for help after pleas for a speed restriction had consistently fallen on deaf ears. Their concern was that one of their children would die on this effectively single-lane, unsealed, undulating road as they walked to or from the main road, where they caught or were dropped off from their school bus, or simply as they played their house. For much of the distance between their house and the main road a driver's forward vision, in either direction, was no more than a few metres, and obviously there was no footpath. In fact there was nowhere for a pedestrian to go to get out of the way of a speeding car.

The major danger was presented by one driver in particular, who travelled the road daily at speeds that gave him no chance of reacting to a pedestrian. No one in their right mind would drive faster than 30 or 40km/h on that road, but it was rural, and therefore governed by the open road speed of 100km/h.

The local cop agreed that the driver complained of was a potentially lethal idiot, but what could he do? If he wasn't exceeding the speed limit he was untouchable. It would be a different story if the speed limit was reduced, but until that happened the arm of the law wasn't very long at all.

The Far North District Council politely declined all invitations to embark upon the process of gazetting a reduced speed limit, however. Didn't meet the criteria. End of story.

It's accepted that we have to have rules. The alternative to that is anarchy, but the rules should be designed to protect people, and glaring examples of lives being endangered should addressed as quickly as possible. No one's interests are served by a process that is designed to prevent positive change rather than enable it. In the case of Pamapuria School, no one's interests are served by a half-hearted acceptance that there is a danger by erecting 'School Zone' signs without taking the obvious next step and slowing traffic. No one will be inconvenienced by a speed restriction over a couple of hundred metres of SH1 at Pamapuria, and once the restriction is in place the police can enforce it, if they need to.

If our government and the civil service that carries out its orders have the administrative will and ability to promulgate laws requiring the fencing of inflatable paddling pools, surely they have the ability to reduce the clear danger to children at schools adjacent to the open road. And any politician or bureaucrat who needs a booster shot of common sense will no doubt be welcome at Pamapuria any time they care to drop in. Or any school for that matter. It would do them good.