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.”

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.”

https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/the-big-meccano-set/

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