The New Zealand government has finally recognised that safer cars and roads are the key to improving road safety, says the car review website dogandlemon.com.
Commenting on the government’s ‘Safer Roads’ plan, editor Clive Matthew-Wilson says:
“The saddest thing about the government’s ‘Safer Roads’ document is that it’s about fifteen years late. Most of these proposals to improve the safety of cars and roads were proposed by me ten to fifteen years ago, and I was widely attacked for proposing them.
"Tragically, since I first proposed most of these programmes, hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of lives have been wasted while bureaucrats repeated the failed mistakes of the past.”
Matthew-Wilson – who was the first person to widely publicise crash test results in New Zealand – adds:
“As I’ve been saying for years, the people most likely to cause accidents are the least likely to respond to road safety messages and simple enforcement. One thing that works consistently is to design cars and roads so that mistakes or reckless driving don’t have to result in tragedy.
“In the 1980s, the Auckland harbour bridge used to suffer one serious road accident every week. After a concrete barrier was installed down the middle, the serious accidents stopped immediately. There wasn’t one less hoon or drunk driver, yet the accidents stopped because the road was changed in a way that prevented mistakes from becoming fatalities.”
