They are telling you a load of bollocks.
Driving on New Zealand roads, particularly during holiday time is a lottery. Someone is going to make a mistake which tragically will result in deaths and injuries to themselves as well as innocent parties. That is a fact, and former Associate Transport Minister Julie-Anne Genter’s ludicrous promise of zero road deaths is not going to change that. And the terrible state of most of the NZ highway system is a big factor.
Let’s get things into perspective. The recent road toll in New Zealand is nothing short of amazingly good given the state of the highway system, the incompetence of a lot of the drivers and the advanced age of most of the cars.
In 2021 319 people were killed on the roads. From a population of five million that was 64 deaths on the road per million people. The best year was 2013, when 253 died on the roads from a population of 4.5 million, equating to 56 deaths per million, so not a lot has changed in the past eight years.
Contrast this with 1973, when there were no such things as Jap import Subaru and Nissan Skyline turbos, ‘boy racer’ was an unknown term, and it was a year when ordinary New Zealanders managed to wipe themselves off the planet in numbers which we haven’t seen before or since. Remembering the way we all used to drive in those days I’m grateful that I’m one of the survivors.
In 1973, 843 New Zealanders died in road crashes. The population then was only 3 million, meaning that 281 people died on the roads per million population. That’s 4.5 times as many as the per million figure for 2021.
Fourteen years later in 1987 it wasn’t much better. All up, 795 died on the roads from a population of 3.3 million, 241 dead per million people.
We must have been doing something right in more recent years. Because 253 deaths in 2013 (56 per million) was a huge improvement and it hasn’t changed much since then.
The doomcasters can carry on all they like but there are a few basic points that need to be addressed. Outside of the multi-lane motorways and new roads like the Waikato Expressway, our roads are substandard compared with most in Western countries. The big trucks have wrecked them. And fixing the potholes (eventually) and slapping on an 80km/h speed limit is not going to solve anything.
Compare our road toll with that of Australia all you like but the fact remains that their roads are of a far higher standard and their drivers are far more disciplined.
Most of our serious crashes are happening on outmoded two-lane roads that are carrying much more traffic than what they were designed to handle. The Government that had plans to fix this is no longer in power.
It is a fact that outside of the motorways that have been constructed in the cities since the 1970s, the rural road network has remained pretty much unchanged, apart from the Waikato Expressway.
I think that New Zealand drivers deserve congratulations for getting the road toll as low as it is in the face of all the obstacles that are placed in front of them.
Place the blame where it really lies.
This article first appeared in the February 2022 issue of NZ Autocar Magazine.
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