The weekend road toll shows the need to rethink road safety, says the car review website dogandlemon.com
Editor Clive Matthew-Wilson, who is an active road safety campaigner, says road deaths tend to involve extremes.
"Most people who die on our roads are extremely young, extremely old, extremely fast, extremely blotto, extremely tired, extremely distracted or extremely confused. A large percentage of road deaths also occur at night or early morning.”
"Therefore, the police policy of trying to lower the road toll by targeting the average driver during the day is doomed to failure, because the average driver is not the problem."
Matthew-Wilson adds:
"It's depressing to hear the police asking motorists to drive safely, when all available evidence suggests the highest risk groups are deaf to road safety messages. It's also depressing hearing the police suggesting that speeding by the average driver is the problem when in fact 80% of the road toll occurs below the speed limit."
"If the road toll had gone down this weekend, the police would have taken the credit and thanked motorists. Now that the road toll has risen, the police will express their disappointment. What the police won't do is admit their basic strategies are flawed."
Matthew-Wilson believes that New Zealand should copy much of Sweden's road safety policies, which focus less on changing driver behaviour, and more or protecting motorists from common mistakes.
“The classic example of using science to prevent road accidents is the Auckland harbour bridge. In the 1980s, there were serious accidents on a regular basis. After a concrete median barrier was installed between opposing lanes of traffic, head-on collisions on the harbour bridge dropped to zero and there was a huge reduction in overall crashes.”
Matthew-Wilson adds:
"When the concrete median barrier was first proposed, there was a huge amount of opposition from people who claimed the problem wasn't unsafe roads, but bad driving. While we cling to this way of thinking, people will continue to die unnecessarily.”
