The only thing I remember is the bright lights as they came towards me. It was after 10 on a wet, good-for-nothing night in the winter of 1989, and I was driving home from my part-time job in Auckland’s St Heliers when I rounded a curve in the road, saw the lights right in front me and …
When I regained consciousness I couldn’t see for the blood in my eyes. Or quite think where I was. But a voice I didn’t know was talking to me. Who should they call, it asked? Could I give them a number? I managed my girlfriend’s and my parents’ and …
When I came to again, I was in an ambulance, its siren blaring my bad news. I still could not see; there was pain; I was panicking. “What’s happening,” I asked the paramedics, “what’s happening?”
I had been in a car accident. I was on my way to Auckland Hospital. I would be okay.
But I was not okay, and it had been no accident. I had been hit head-on by a drunk driver. He had crossed the centre line. I’d been keeping my speed down in the rain; he had not. My car was a write-off, and so, for many months after, was my face.
Glass had ripped open the flesh on my cheek and forehead, leaving slivers embedded around my right eye. I had been lucky not to lose it, the plastic surgeon told me, but the injuries left me with angry, red scars around my right eye and nose and surgical metal in my face.
So I was not okay, though in the most important way, I was. Although I was among the nearly 16,000 people injured and maimed on our roads in 1989, I had not joined the dead. And there were many. By the time the year was done, 755 people had been killed on the roads – two people every day – making it one of the worst years in our history. In 1989, we lost around 22 people out every 100,000 on our roads, making them little better than killing fields.
Dishearteningly, 35 years after my accident they largely still are, with around seven out of every 100,000 dying on the roads. Despite all the safety features of modern cars, all the road improvements, policing and awareness campaigns, and all the stories like this one, we are still dying at a rate significantly higher than almost every other advanced country.
But perhaps the most depressing fact is this: after decades of a slow decline from the peak in the 1970s, road deaths have not been going down for the past 10 years, but up, apart from during the Covid pandemic. The obvious question is how do we fix it?
Denying the evidence
It was called The Road to Zero and until three months ago, it was supposed to be the answer. Developed in the first term of the Ardern Labour-led government, it was a 10-year, “evidence-based” strategy that aimed to be the beginning of the end of the carnage.
Based on an international movement called Vision Zero, which produced significant decreases in road deaths and injury in Sweden, New York and parts of Australia, Road to Zero had a different philosophy from previous toll-reduction efforts.
Taking as its starting point overseas research showing that only about 30% of serious crashes involve deliberate rule-breaking or risk-taking – such as intentional speeding and drink driving – Road to Zero was based on the belief that the big problem is not the usual suspects: bad drivers, careless cyclists or distracted pedestrians. It is the fault of an “unforgiving system” not taking into account that people sometimes make mistakes. Under Road to Zero, it was important not just to ask “why did that person crash?” but “why was that person killed or seriously injured in that crash?”
With five areas of focus, including speed-limit reductions and adding median barriers to dangerous roads, Road to Zero launched with an ambitious target: reducing road deaths and injuries by 40% (from 2018 levels) between 2020 and 2030.
It seems hard to criticise aspirations to save around 750 people from death and 5600 from seriously injury, but attitudes to the strategy, particularly to lowering speed limits, were mixed.
Former Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency national traffic and safety manager Fergus Tate tells the Listener Road to Zero, with which he had some involvement, was based on an “internationally acclaimed and widely adopted approach” adapted for the New Zealand situation through consultation with more than 100 transport sector representatives. It gave New Zealand a “world-leading road safety approach” and other countries are now following in our footsteps, he says.
However, AA road safety spokesperson Dylan Thomsen and long-time road-safety campaigner and Dog and Lemon Guide publisher Clive Matthew-Wilson believe Road to Zero had issues.
Thomsen says in hindsight it wasn’t well enough thought out and remained “vague and unclear” in how it would reach its 2030 target. While speed-limit changes can make “a big, big difference” in terms of safety, he says they “need to suit the look and feel” of a road. “If they don’t make sense to people then you can end up with a situation where most people just drive above the speed limit most of the time.”
Matthew-Wilson believes Road to Zero was too focused on changing behaviour – “which never works” – and with the Greens’ Julie Anne Genter as associate transport minister for road safety at the time it was developed, the strategy was too driven by that party’s agenda.
“[The Greens] saw this as an opportunity to reduce car dependency,” he says. “As a result, the emphasis of Road to Zero was speed reduction rather than road improvement.”
To prove it was the right approach, Road to Zero needed to start meeting its goals. But by December 2022, it was clear it wasn’t. Waka Kotahi acknowledged that a 40% reduction in death and injury by 2030 was not now achievable. As well, the rollout of median barriers was slower than planned. Worse, road deaths, after dropping a little during the years affected by Covid-19 lockdowns, rose again in 2022.
By last year, although some progress had been made on the introduction of rules, such as requiring new motorcycles over 125cc to have anti-lock braking systems, it was clear the nascent strategy was struggling, particularly on road-safety infrastructure. Of about 500km of new median barriers planned by this year, less than half have been built.
Clearly, Road to Zero was going to need more time if it was to succeed as similar strategies have overseas. But all hope of that ended with the change of government.
Slow ahead
Central to Road to Zero’s death was the focus on speed-limit reductions, the strategy’s philosophy being, as an old road safety campaign put it, the faster you go, the bigger the mess. When Road to Zero was launched in late 2019, about 87% of speed limits were deemed inappropriate for the conditions of the roads. Reducing speed limits on some roads was “one of the most efficient and immediate things we could do to reduce trauma”, the strategy argued.
The principal instrument for this was the last government’s Land Transport Rule: Setting of Speed Limits, which took effect last May. Local councils and Waka Kotahi were required to develop speed management plans, leading to an eventual rollout of lower speed limits around parts of the country, with some urban roads planned to go from 50km/h to 30, and some open roads from 100km/h to 80.
However, while dropping limits near schools was uncontroversial, cuts to speed elsewhere proved unpopular with many drivers, or at least the vocal ones. In hindsight, it’s clear those implementing speed-limit drops struggled to sell the idea.
“The sense of trying to ‘sell’ an idea to the public may well have been part of the problem,” Thomsen says. “I have certainly heard complaints from many people around the country that councils and authorities had already made up their mind when they were consulting and wouldn’t change them regardless of what the public said.”
This explains all the anger from social media posters, letter writers, talkback callers and even mayors who all got stuck into the apparent madness of lowering limits.
In Wairarapa, the lowering of the SH2 limit between Masterton and Featherston to 80km/h caused Carterton Mayor Ron Mark to have conniptions. “These idiots think speed is the problem,” he told a local paper in January last year. “Grow up. There were only two fatal crashes last year in Wairarapa where speed was the cause.”
And then there was the trucking industry, which Matthew-Wilson says has strong links to National and Act. Nick Leggett, head of trucking industry lobby group Transporting NZ, told the New Zealand Herald early last year that lower speed limits “would slow New Zealanders and the economy down” and Waka Kotahi “needed to focus more attention on fixing roads and installing safety infrastructure”.
Ideological driver
It was little wonder that National saw speed limits as an ideological wedge issue and an easy vote winner going into the election. Speed wasn’t the issue, the party argued; drunk drivers, not enough police enforcement and bad road surfaces were bigger problems.
In September, National announced it would clear a path for a reversal of speed reductions if it became the government. Echoing trucking industry rhetoric, then-transport spokesman Simeon Brown effectively politicised speed limits, claiming that “under the guise of safety, Labour has exposed its anti-car ideology by slowing down New Zealanders going about their daily lives”.
Brown also claimed the strategy created “blanket speed-limit reductions”, though, in reality, most roads would remain untouched. “‘Blanket’ was a convenient buzzword,” Tate says. “Road to Zero was targeting approximately 10,000km of roads and streets for speed-limit changing where it was uneconomic for infrastructure investment [to make them safer]. That was less than 10% of the total transport network.”
National’s insinuation that lower speed limits would dramatically slow New Zealanders down was also an exaggeration. It takes less than 10 minutes longer to cover 100km at 80km/h than driving at 100km/h for cars, and even less for trucks (heavy vehicles have a speed limit of 90km/h). However, the safety difference is huge.
According to analysis of New Zealand crash data from 2015-19, the number of people killed or seriously injured per crash on a road with a speed limit of 100km/h is 40% higher than in crashes on 80km/h roads. Dropping urban speed from 50km/h to 30km/h improves a pedestrian or cyclist’s chance of survival in a crash by 90%.
Yet reversing Road to Zero speed drops became a big priority for National all the same – it was No 14 on the coalition’s 100-day action plan and was among the first to be ticked off. Just 18 days after the coalition deals were signed, Brown, now Minister of Transport, announced the reversal of the “blanket approach” to speeds which, he said, “ignored economic impacts and the views of road users and local communities”.
Instead, a new transport rule would be written, creating a transport system that “boosts productivity and economic growth and allows New Zealanders to get to where they want to go, faster and safer”.
Right turn ahead
New Zealand now needs a new road safety strategy, fast. And it will have one by July.
Early this month, Brown released the coalition’s draft government policy statement (GPS) on land transport which says it will spend about $7 billion a year over three years on roading, with much hoopla around the plan centring on building new “roads of national significance”, while spending up to $4.8 billion on fixing potholes.
On safety, the GPS leans heavily into more road policing (including more roadside breath testing and targeting recidivist drunk drivers), hiking fines and penalties, bringing in roadside drug testing (something the Labour government failed to complete) and continuing the installation of “low-cost” road infrastructure such as rumble strips.
It is unclear from the GPS whether the highly effective, but much more expensive, median barrier rollout planned under Road to Zero will continue.
The document’s key safety focus is catching drunk and drugged drivers because, it says, alcohol and drugs are “the leading contributors to fatal crashes”.
This is undeniably true, and in the past 10 years, road deaths involving alcohol and drugs have risen. But focusing on deaths alone fails to tell the full story. Alcohol and drugs were implicated in 163 fatal crashes in 2022 (confirmed figures are not yet available for 2023), compared with 104 deaths involving speed. However, when serious injury is considered, speed was involved in more than three times as many crashes as alcohol and drugs.
In 2022, 459 serious-injury crashes were attributed to speed, while 144 were attributed to drugs and alcohol. In Auckland last year, 68% of serious crashes involved speed, while alcohol and drugs contributed to 34%.
And it may also be that official figures underplay speed’s lethal effect. A study co-published in 2022 in the Journal of Road Safety by New Zealand researcher Colin Brodie found that speed was “substantially underestimated” as a factor in serious road crashes, and speed could be involved in about 60% of fatal crashes – meaning speed kills more people a year in New Zealand than homicide.
It should be remembered, too, that international research suggests about 70% of serious injury crashes result from mistakes by usually careful, law-abiding drivers.
No matter. The GPS makes it clear any speed-limit reductions made under Road to Zero can now be reversed “where it is safe to do so”, with posted speed limits to be determined by a “benefit-cost analysis”.
This means if the estimated dollar value of the “economic cost” for a lower speed limit is shown to be higher than the estimated dollar “cost” of death and injury through crashes, economics wins and the speed limit goes back up. In plain English, it means profit is more important than lower speed limits to prevent death and injury.
“There’s a lot of rhetoric about how [lower speed limits] are going to cripple the economy,” Tate says. “I struggle with the idea that you could improve the economy while putting people’s lives in danger.”
Indeed, Claes Tingvall, the Swede who helped create the Vision Zero strategy on which Road to Zero was based, called it “immoral” to trade people’s safety for economic benefits. “I suspect he’s right,” Tate says. “I think it is effectively immoral.”
Barriers to fewer deaths
Improving road safety is an immensely complex business with many interlocking parts, including policing, vehicle safety, appropriate speed management, improving the safety infrastructure on roads, driver education, cameras, penalties, along with myriad other factors. It’s also a matter of how these elements are brought together, and opinions differ on that.
Each of the road safety experts the Listener spoke to for this story placed different emphasis on some of those areas and favoured some solutions over others (though all agreed that such road safety infrastructure as median barriers demonstrably works).
But in the end, the new government sets the priorities. The AA’s Thomsen says there are “lots of good things” in the GPS, including a focus on more police on the roads, more alcohol testing, better maintenance and resurfacing roads. “The key challenge the government will have is to deliver real progress and results in the years ahead.”
Tate says that, while the new roads and bypasses planned will undeniably contribute to safety, these are the most expensive way to save lives and prevent injury, and are less efficient than low-cost solutions. “The increase in focus on maintenance is great from a safety perspective, but the fixation on potholes as a safety issue is frustrating,” he says. “The biggest maintenance safety issue is typically skidding resistance, not potholes.”
Matthew-Wilson says the pressure to build new roads is mostly coming from property developers and the trucking industry. “Building new roads instead of properly fixing old ones will produce a handful of safer highways at the expense of the rest of the roading network. The same money could have been used to fit median barriers and roadside fencing on a large percentage of high-risk roads around the country.”
Toll all that counts
There are two glaring omissions in the GPS. One is any mention of setting new targets on lowering road deaths and injuries, suggesting PM Christopher Luxon’s result-oriented government has no ambition on these, or it doesn’t have the courage to set targets that could be missed. The other omission is what to do about our famously cavalier attitudes on the roads.
In terms of the latter, New Zealand drivers tend to suffer from a sense that they are the only ones on the road. “European drivers grow up knowing they’re sharing the roads with millions of others,” says Matthew-Wilson. “Kiwi drivers still expect the road to be free of obstructions such as other motorists.”
The other major problem is that, unlike me and others who have experienced a serious car crash, few Kiwis think road death or serious injury could happen to them.
Tate says, “For so many of the public, they don’t know anybody [who’s had a serious car accident], and they don’t actually see the risk actually exists. So [with lower speed limits] we were putting in a solution that from many people’s point of view is a solution to a non-existent risk.”
Superintendent Steve Greally, the director of the National Road Policing Centre, says one of the biggest takeaways on driver psychology is that people fear penalties more than they fear our roads. “That’s because they fundamentally don’t ever believe they will die on our roads but they do think they’ll be caught.”
So National’s new strategy looks well targeted on policing, higher fines and penalties and a greater emphasis on catching drunk and drugged drivers.
However, any progress towards the internationally proven strategy of targeted speed-limit reductions is now in the rear-view mirror. That’s a decision that will be judged by the only measure of road safety that matters, and that’s not profits for trucking companies, how many potholes are fixed or how many new roads are built.
Swedish way
While the country awaits the new government to finalise its road safety plans, we should consider what manifestly worked in Sweden, a country with a proven record of lowering its road toll from the highs of the 1970s to one of the lowest in the world today; a country that had almost half the number of road deaths as New Zealand in 2022, despite having twice the population and a larger roading network.
Its solutions didn’t prioritise profit. Starting from 1997, the Swedish government made detailed analysis and planning the keys to reducing road trauma. Roads were built or altered to prioritise safety over speed and convenience, according to the Economist. Speed limits were lowered, median barriers and barriers to protect cyclists were built. As well, hundreds of kilometres of so-called “2+1″ roads were added so that a passing lane alternated between traffic directions (this saved about 145 lives in the first decade). Strict policing helped, as did many thousands of safer pedestrian crossings.
The result is that Sweden, which continues to aim for zero deaths, now loses just 2.17 people out of every 100,000 on its roads. New Zealand, meanwhile, lost 7.3 in 2022. Has somebody told the new minister for transport?