Looking at the decade ahead

Summer Issue: October 2009

By Brian Gibbons, AA CEO

At an international conference in Moscow later this year the United Nations will call for a decade of action on road safety. The objective will be to reduce the forecast number of road deaths worldwide in 2020 by half, saving five million lives and preventing 50 million serious injuries. Road deaths have displaced disease as the leading cause of death among young people worldwide - and so the UN is addressing road safety, just as it has diseases such as malaria and HIV/Aids.

Your Association is among the global network of automobile clubs which form part of the FIA Foundation's 'Make Roads Safe' campaign prompting this action. It has been instrumental in ensuring that New Zealand will be represented and hopefully committed to the UN's objectives.

Locally, too, your Association is committed to the cause of road safety. Some Members will be aware that the Ministry of Transport has been consulting on New Zealand's own Road Safety Strategy to 2020. This strategy will shape the way we, as a community, respond to the challenge of reducing New Zealand's unacceptably high levels of road trauma.

But there are a few important facts about our progress in road safety which I believe aren't widely understood. The first is that over the past 10 years the number of injuries per kilometre travelled has remained constant. Despite millions of dollars in fines and tickets, all the messages on television and all the safety projects, we are no safer for every kilometre we travel now than in 2001.

We have watched road deaths track down, but ignored the serious injuries which have tracked up sharply. The severity of crashes has been reduced through improvements in vehicle crash-worthiness and protection, but the number of crashes continues to climb.

The relationship between the number of tickets issued and the number of injury crashes experienced is also widely misunderstood. If enforcement did reduce injury, the more drivers ticketed, the safer we would be. Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. Enforcement has an important influence on drivers, but a change in the rate of ticketing doesn't change the rate of injury.

What we have to recognise is that making things a crime does not stop them happening. If we want to prevent road injury we have to be prepared to take direct action to bring down the rate of injury by preventing collisions. That means making roads safer and more forgiving of error. It also means better informing our drivers about what they can do to keep themselves and other road users safe, and encouraging them to take responsibility.

I suspect taking such action to save lives will be expensive. But, every year, the Government collects $100 million from road users through fines. The AA recently called on the Government to spend all our fines money on road safety - a change research shows is supported by 91% of AA Members. With 10 years of investing, that $1 billion could prevent the waste of hundreds of lives and also the waste of billions of dollars responding to road trauma.

Before we embark on a new road safety strategy we need to reflect on the previous strategy, consider what has worked and what has not. It would be folly to continue an approach that has made no difference to injury rates.

New Zealand, like the rest of the world, needs a decade of action on road safety. But it must be with a fresh approach, not one that continues to do what has always been done.