By admin 
Economic recession is the main reason for 2024’s low
road toll, says the car review website dogandlemon.com. Editor
Clive Matthew-Wilson, who is an outspoken road safety
campaigner, says recessions are bad for the economy but good
for road safety.
“The overall road toll has been
steadily falling since the late 1980s, but the annual highs
and lows of the toll closely follow the economy. This is
true globally.”
“New
Zealand’s worst road toll was 1973, when 843 people died.
Despite growing economic threats, there was very low
unemployment in the early 1970s and fuel was cheap. Most of
the affordable cars were decades old and many lacked even
seatbelts. Seatbelt use was optional before 1972. Those who
couldn’t afford a car drove motorbikes, but helmets were
not compulsory. The speed limit was raised to 100kp/h. Then
the 1973 fuel crisis crashed the world’s economy. One year
later, the road toll had dropped by nearly 200, to
676.”
“The second highest road toll (797), was in
1987, just before global sharemarket crash. The next year
the toll had dropped by 70, to 727.” [2]
“After
1987, the road toll continued its fall, to this day, due to
three main factors: the mass importation of used Japanese
cars[3], the gradual installation of median barriers and
other highway improvements, plus the growing enforcement of
speed, drink-driving and seatbelt
laws.”
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Matthew-Wilson adds that unemployment is a
good predictor of the road toll: high unemployment means a
lower road toll, and vice versa.”
“Currently,
unemployment among the young is high, which is undoubtedly
bad for them but probably good for the road toll. Poor
people die more often on the roads than rich people. The
groups most likely to be unemployed during recessions, such
as mill workers, often get jobs again as the economy
recovers.”
“A significant percentage of industrial
workers are heavy drinkers with a casual attitude towards
health and safety. Worse, 3/4 of New Zealand drivers who die
in drug-related crashes have more than one substance in
their system. According to Waka Kotahi, the combination of
alcohol, illegal drugs and legal medication can increase
your risk of an impaired fatal crash by 23
times.”
About two-thirds of fatal accidents occur on
rural roads, many of them far beyond the reach of speed
cameras and police radar. A large percentage of these deaths
are males, with Maori heavily
overrepresented.
“Poverty, both in terms of lack of
education, substance abuse and poor quality vehicles,
appears to heavily influence this road toll. The same
drivers most likely to crash are also most likely to be
impaired and are often not wearing a seatbelt at the time of
the accident.”
Motorbikes are the highest risk
group
Between 2019 – 2023, motorcyclists were
involved in 18% of fatal crashes and 23% of serious injury
crashes.
• “Globally, the road toll also tends to
rise and fall with the number of motorcyclists. This is
reflected in the New Zealand road toll:
• “In the
last two decades there has a been a huge spike in the number
of deaths of middle-aged men riding large motorbikes. These
motorcyclists were at more than 100-times greater risk of
death (respectively) than
non-motorcyclists.”
• “While sales of
these large bikes tend to drop during recessions, the men
who already own them are likely to keep riding, although
they may ride less often. So, motorbike accidents are likely
to eventually fall also, but perhaps not as fast as car and
truck accidents.”
Trucks make up nearly 20% of the
road toll
“Recessions mean less trucks on our
roads. As economies grow, so do the numbers of trucks moving
goods. Therefore, the road toll rises.”
“Trucks
are a major road safety hazard. In 1980, accidents involving
trucks made up 12% of the road toll. In 2022, accidents
involving trucks made up 19% of the road toll. That’s one
of the major reasons our road toll is as high as it
is.”
The speed of the average driver is not the
major issue
In
2009, the New Zealand Automobile Association “examined
over 300 fatal crash reports from 2008, to see what patterns
emerged.”
The AA concluded that: “[It’s not]
true that middle-New Zealand drivers creeping a few
kilometres over the limit on long empty straights dominate
the road toll… Only one in six fatal crashes were reported
over the speed limit – and they were well over…[These
fatal accidents] were caused by people who don’t care
about any kind of rules. These are men who speed, drink,
don’t wear safety belts, have no valid licence or WoF –
who are basically renegades. They usually end up wrapped
around a tree, but they can also overtake across a yellow
line and take out other motorists as
well.”
Matthew-Wilson agrees, adding:
“Speed
is never good nor bad, it is merely appropriate to the
conditions. The fastest legal road in the country – the
Waikato Expressway – is also one of the
safest.
“According to the Ministry of Transport,
speed-only is the primary cause of just 11% of fatalities,
and almost all these speed-related fatalities involve either
poorly-educated young males, impaired drivers or reckless
motorcyclists.”
“This group typically ignores
speed signs, speed cameras and road safety
messages.”
Matthew-Wilson gave the example of
15-year-old Reihana Horohau Maitu Powell Hawea, who recently
died in a high speed head-on smash after he drove a stolen
ute on the wrong side of the road while fleeing
police.
Matthew-Wilson asks: “How would a lowered
highway speed limit have prevented this tragedy?”
He
adds: “On one level, speeding drivers know that speeding
is dangerous, but they often don’t believe that harm will
happen to them personally. Therefore, increasing the
penalties for speeding usually makes no difference to these
high risk offenders.”
“Fines work as a deterrent
for middle-class people with accessible incomes. However,
fines are often largely ineffective against the men most
likely to cause fatalities.”
Matthew-Wilson’s
conclusions are backed up by most available studies,
including the largest study of fines as a deterrent ever
conducted in Australia, which concluded that fines and
disqualification do not reduce the risk of
offending.
Keep it simple
Matthew-Wilson says
the key to lowering the road toll is
simple:
“Improve the roads, improve the cars, move
longhaul road freight from trucks to rail, make it harder to
get a motorbike licence and re-target enforcement to high
risk groups, such as impaired and reckless drivers, drivers
using cellphones and vehicle occupants who are not wearing
seatbelts.”
“Just before the road toll started
falling in the late 1980s, the Auckland harbour bridge used
to often suffer one serious accident a
week.”[4]
“Multiple attempts were made to improve
the standard of driving on the harbour bridge, and they all
failed. Eventually the authorities built a concrete barrier
between the opposing lanes of traffic, and the serious
accidents virtually stopped overnight. There wasn’t one
less idiot on the road, but the road was changed in a way
that prevented simple mistakes from becoming
fatalities.”
• Clive Matthew-Wilson has been
actively campaigning on road safety and consumer issues for
25 years. Mentored by engineer Chris Coxon (former technical
chair and founding member of the Australian New Car
Assessment Program – ANCAP), Matthew-Wilson was the first
person to publish crash test results in New Zealand. His
research into seatbelt upgrades was awarded by the
Australian Police Journal. Matthew-Wilson is a strong
supporter of pedestrians’ and cyclists’ rights and has
helped shape many major road safety policies in New
Zealand.
Clive Matthew-Wilson was the founder of constitution.org.nz
1
It has been claimed that the dramatic drop in the road toll
was the result of the lowering of the official speed limit
from 100kp/h to 80kp/h in 1973. However, Clive
Matthew-Wilson (who was learning to drive at the time)
dismisses this claim, saying: “the reduced speed limit was
largely ignored. It was only sporadically enforced in the
city and was unenforceable in rural areas. However, the high
cost of fuel meant that most motorists drove far less than
previously. Crucially, because weekend petrol sales were
banned, the prevailing teenage habit of cruising highways on
Saturday nights, dropped sharply, along with the road
toll.”
https://teara.govt.nz/en/photograph/23966/locking-the-pumps
2
The same thing occured after the the 2008 Global Financial
Crisis: In 2007, the road toll was 421. After the 2008
crash, the road toll dropped to 366, and, after a couple of
slight rises, continued to fall until 2013, when the road
toll was just 253.
3 Iain McGlinchy, who spent 17
years as a policy advisor at the Ministry of Transport, says
the introduction of used-imports was one of the best things
that happened to the NZ vehicle fleet.
“We got much
newer and safer vehicles,” he says. “Until about 2005,
the [used Japanese imports] were better on every level than
[most cars sold new in New Zealand], because we were able to
cherry-pick the top-spec models from Japan.”
https://northandsouth.co.nz/2022/10/08/new-zealand-labour-scrap-and-replace-scheme-car-emissions/
4
“The latter half of 1989 was a particularly bad period for
road accidents on the bridge. There were nine fatalities
between July 1989 and February 1990. A Japanese tourist was
killed when her motorcycle hit a small ridge between lanes
and she was catapulted into the path of an oncoming truck. A
trailer broke free from a utility and smashed into the
following car, killing the woman driver. Worse still, on the
evening of November 24, 1989, a wildly out-of control
northbound car spun across three lanes at high speed and
collided with a southbound car that had not the slightest
chance of avoiding it. Just three days later, a Dunedin
doctor was killed when his car skidded across six lanes and
hit a vehicle on the very outside lane.”
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