The highest risk drivers tend to ignore both risks and penalties, says the car review website dogandlemon.com.

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 adds: “On one level, speeding drivers know that speeding is dangerous, but they often don’t believe that harm will happen to them personally. Sadly, increasing the penalties for speeding usually makes no difference to these highest risk offenders."

"Fines work as a deterrent for middle-class people with accessible incomes. However, fines are often largely ineffective against the two highest risk groups of road users – teenagers and poor people."

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.

The study, carried out by the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, identified 70,000 NSW persons who received a court-imposed fine for a driving offence between 1998 and 2000. Researchers then followed each offender for a period of five years to see whether they committed another driving offence. After controlling for a wide range of other factors likely to influence re-offending. The Bureau found no relationship between the magnitude for the fine imposed and the likelihood of a further driving offence. The same negative result was obtained for drink-drive (PCA) offences, drive while disqualified offences, exceeding the speed limit and ‘other’ driving offences.

For most of these offences the Bureau also found no relationship between the period of license disqualification and the risk of a further driving offence. For speeding offences, longer disqualification periods actually made the situation worse because it increased the risk that the offender would drive illegally.

Commenting on the findings, the Director of the Bureau, Dr Don Weatherburn, said that they were consistent with a large body of evidence indicating that, contrary to popular opinion, tougher penalties do not reduce the risk of re-offending.

Matthew-Wilson adds: “The bureaucrats who come up with our road safety strategies tend to see life as a series of planned steps. These bureaucrats have little idea of how young people and poor people actually think or act. In a typical case a student will own an old car and the WOF will run out. While he’s sorting out a WOF, the car gets a ticket. Because he hasn’t got a WOF, he can’t register his car, so he gets a another ticket. Next thing enforcement fees are added. Then the bailiffs seize his car. Nothing is gained from any of this.”

Matthew-Wilson says speed has become a political football: “The squabbling between the Greens and the rednecks over speed really doesn’t help."

“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. “

“ On the other hand, when cars, bikes and pedestrians are moving in close proximity, much lower speed limits are appropriate. However, in practice, it’s often far safer to physically protect vulnerable road users, using roadside fencing and raised pedestrian crossings.”

“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 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.”

Matthew-Wilson is also concerned at the number of motorbike accidents, as many of them are fatal and involve speeding.

• "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.”

Matthew-Wilson says lowering the road toll is relatively simple:

“Improve the roads, move longhaul road freight from trucks to rail, improve the cars, make it harder to get a motorbike licence and re-target enforcement to high risk groups, such as impaired, 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 suffer one serious accident a week."

"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 had been changed in a way that prevented simple mistakes becoming fatalities.”

© Scoop Media