Candor Trust Media Release

Batmobile Transport Strategy - eject now

The NZ Governments draft Transport Strategy document is recklessly daffy in it's emphasis upon Green issues, and helping to avert natural disasters in a thousand years time. It has no preventive element as regards toll deaths from today out to 2040, offering us 10,000 Tangi and torrential tears, say Candor Trust.

The strong environmental emphasis has produced a lop sided approach, that fails to seriously address major road safety risks. The only consideration given to road safety, is that it may benefit, in a long shot, if Government succeeds in it's aim of aggressively ejecting Kiwis from vehicles.

The strategy states that car travel is to become a luxury commodity by 2040 - clearly making road safety innovation moot in the long run, and not worth looking at now. Yeah Right to this line of not thinking.

Pipe dreams of empied highways save for the big rigs is essentially how LTNZ's rocket scientists are proposing to reduce our toll to similar levels to the best countries' today - by 2040. In the meantime 10,000 will die - more than twice the per capita rates of Countries taking road safety seriously.

Having the eye firmly off the road safety ball as it is heaily trained on the environmental one has already caused trauma to spirl out of control with the crash numbers increasing and social costs of fatal and injurious crashes increasing over 5 years from 3 to 4 billion dollars - 2.15 was the 2010 goal.

An extraordinary lack of any specific evidence base road safety initiatives midst a flurry of anti emission ones within the draft Transport Strategy, which must set Jeanette Fitzsimmons well meaning heart aflutter, means achieving even that ghastly high toll target of 10,000 will likely prove an insurmountable challenge.

Candor Trust say it is absolutely cuckoo that the foundation of the meagre toll reduction plan rests primarily on stopping driving. It forgoes traditional evidence based means; road engineering, safe vehicles, 90 kph speed limits, confronting impaired driving (drink, drugs, recidivists and fatigue).

LTNZ has issued a statement warning people that roads in NZ are not really safe enough to venture out on. Our Politicians - who apparently must travel privately - were then funded into high safety spec BMW's.

And LTNZ's latest move, obviously inspired by Green Goggles was employing scientists to study how subjects can best have their "emotional attachment" to vehicles destroyed. LTNZs approach would be comical if results weren't so sinister - and heading for worse down at Land Transport NonsenseZ.

Candor do not believe LTNZ, or a Government hijacked by extreme Greens, have feet firmly on terra firma. To assume the road toll can be felled by stopping land transportation from occurring, ignores the fact that many families and friends who like to get together are scattered from Cape Reinga to Bluff.

The reality Government had better face sooner rather than later is that even exorbitant gas prices have put nary a dent in vehicle kilometres travelled. If they think tolling roads (as suggested in policy) will more effectively erect a life and emissions saving Berlin Wall between centres, they should think again.

Kiwis are addicted to land transport, and upping taxes on it will be as effective as heavy duties on alcohol are to stop drinking. "Just stay home - or fly if you must, while buying those all important carbon credits" will be the mother of all social marketing messages to brainwash a population with.

Rather than dedicating all resources and what limited brain power they have to pie in sky goals of eradicating Kiwis from our road network one way or another, Government would be better advised to just make some honest attempts to make it "Safe As".

Or is it too late to rethink the Draft plan now it's organiser the Transport Secretary has done the dirty, and fled from Office before his chooks (ever more massive road trauma) all come home to roost? "It's all too blood thirsty seeking 10,000 deaths - they can't be serious," say Candor's shell shocked road safety volunteers.

The Trust believe Government must wake up to the reality that if thinking on the toll issue isn't rescued fom the Green haze and daze soon (this includes their shafting of significant drug driving intervention), New Zealand might as well say goodbye to the large foreign language school influx it anticipates.

The violent crime rate has scared the dollars away before, and the secret about our even bloodier roads has begun to get out,with many Asian tourists killed and crippled of late. They certainly don't face such a high and worsening injury risk level at home.

And nor should the 10,000 Kiwis who will be killed / at least 100,000 badly injured by 2040, provided all goes swingingly badly to the Governments bizarre & unconscionable road "safety" plan.

ENDS

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