Safe Speed Forums

Reading the SafeSpeed site recently prompted me to conduct my own short study of road-safety / speed policing in my country. The findings were quite interesting.

Since 2002, together with a marked increase in fixed and mobile cameras, the Police and the Land Transport Safety Authority (basically, the DoT) have concentrated their efforts on reducing speed. Speed Kills is repeated ad nauseum on television, radio and in print. Big signs adorm major highways with reminders that only fools speed and should one ever get pulled for speeding, one can expect a long and tedious lecture from the boy-in-blue.

Unfortunately, the statistical data available in NZ is not that detailed. One must rely on the the LTSA's own figures for fatalities and causes of accidents. The raw data is not readily available or is any indication given as to the classification methods of statistical data.

Regardless, the data presented is quite interesting. The road toll in 1990 was around 700 and fell steadily to an all-time low in 2002 of 405. In 2003 it was 461. 2004 was 435, and 2005's year-to-date figure is higher than last year's.

Fatalities caused by speeding shows a similar story: 87 in 2000, 123 in 2001, 108 in 2002 and 140 in 2003. No data is available for 2004 or 2005 to-date.

Examinations of the mean highway speeds for the periods in question clearly show the speeds falling by around 17% since 2000, yet the road toll has not fallen. The 85th percentile speed still exceeds the national limit, but has also fallen.

The figures show that the government's policy to reduce the road-toll is simply not working. The downward trend can prior to 2002 can be linked to many factors, the most important is arguably a significant reduction in the average age of the car on NZ's roads. NZ now has one of the most competitive new and used car markets in the world and a vast number of cheap low-mileage used cars imported from Japan started to hit the market from 1997 onwards. Better tyres, better brakes, better suspension, ABS, traction control ... all go towards reducing road toll.

The government regularly trot out the same tired 33% of deaths are due to speeding statistic as they do in the UK. No source is ever given for this figure, though as NZ closely models policy on that in the UK and in Australia, it doesn't take a genius to work out where it came from.

Police seem to concentrate in revenue-generation rather than catching criminals, which has recently brought them an enormous amount of bad publicity, based around one incident where a distressed young woman called 999 early one morning after reporting being scared and having been threatened at a party. The police sent a taxi ... to the wrong address. The young women has never been seen since. It was later found out that there were 10 traffic patrol cars operating within 30km of her that evening at the time she called.

I only wish that there were sufficient well-trained people in NZ to start a similar site to SafeSpeed. Keep up the good work, fellas.

Nice post - thanks, and welcome.

You'll doubtless be pleased to hear that there is indeed a similar site in New Zealand:

http://www.fastandsafe.org

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Hello Sanx & a welcome from me too.

I don't know whether I should say it's pleasing to know we're not alone or not. Suffice to say you and your countrymen have my deepest sympathies with regard to what you say about the degradation of the police in the eyes of the locals.

It isn't a generally power-pissed left leaning control freak government you have there is it? I just wonder whether they're all the same or these imbeciles who set policy for our roads come out of different types of pods?

Please give us the lay Kiwi's view and guide to the Government of New Zealand.

Hi Sanx. Nice to get more views from the other side of the world, though what you had to say makes it sound like TPTB are even worse there. As speed obsessed as some Chief Constables are I can't imagine a taxi being sent in response to a 999 call regardless of how close the nearest police car was . That's appalling. I'm not normally one for supporting legal action against public services as it just takes away funds and makes them even worse, but in that case I hope the woman's family sue the arse off the person responsible.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

A left-leaning control-freak government? Now how did you guess...

The Labour government rules in a coalition with the Green party (policies: sustainable everything, raise fuel tax, raise electricity tax and lealise dope).

Recently, more and more policies have come out that do reek of control-freakery. Thou shalt put a fence at least 1.5 metres high around your swimming pool or spa bath, no matter if you already have a fence round your garden and you have no kids (this effects more people here than it does in the UK, I'd imagine). Thou shalt indicate for at least three seconds when performing a change of direction - even changing lanes on an empty motorway. Thou shalt be ignored by the government, unless thou happenst to be a member of a certain racial minority in which case thou shalt have money thrown at thou until thou drownst.

In regards to the taxi case, the Police Commissioner did end up with his danglies on the line, but promised (after another similar incident happened about a week later) to carry out a full review of the 999 emergency system. The Australian cop hired was pretty scathing in his report and the cops did start implementing some changes. However, the traffic situation has not got any better and complaints about abuse of power by traffic cops go ignored regularly.

Ah. Would they by any chance be the loonies who wanted to tax cow farts?

And how the hell do they police the indicator rule? Lots of people with binoculars, stopwatches and clipboards hanging around the roads all day? Every bit of CCTV scrutinized looking for drivers whose signals are on for 2.5 seconds? I'm all for clear signals but this sounds like another one of those laws that can't possibly be enforced.

You have to go some to find dafter road policies than we have here, but we're almost sane by comparison.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

From my experience in NZ (1 month tour around the North Island) speed limit enforcement is worse in NZ than the UK. People we saw there were warning against going even a few kph over the limit as many cops don't give much leniency (unlike the 10% +2mph or so in the UK). Also, what's worse is all the trafpol cars have forward and reverce facing radar mounted on the car, which is linked to the car's speedo. If you are on the same road (travelling in either direction) as a trafpol then he can get your speed without even stopping! .

Fortunately I was in a campervan that topped out at 100kph

Yep, Gatsobait, they're the ones who wanted to introduce the fart tax, though when examined it wasn't quite as stupid as many of their other policies - it's all relative though.

The cops theoretically must give a 10% leeway, and all fixed and mobile cameras have at least a 10% leeway built in. Having experimented with a number of fixed cameras on my motorbike (no number-plate on the front ), the majority (all mounted in 50km/h zones) don't seem to fire until 65km/h or so.

However, enforcement is worse. As Samco rightly states, all jam sandwiches have forward and backward pointing radar systems with instant-on capability. Radar detectors are legal and widely used, but not much protection against a radar sysem that can turn on and get a valid lock withing .5 of a second or so.

After a significant number of complaints recently, the Police have severely curtailed their use of unmarked cop cars (they might be unmarked, but they're ALL late model Holden Commodores or Ford Falcons and you can spot the radar units and cop radio aerials from a mile off anyway). However, most highway speed traps are carried out on the few spots where it is possible to get some speed up and overtake. Running speed traps on overtaking lanes is commonplace depsite having been identified by the coroner's court in one instance for causing an accident.

All camera vans are unmarked Toyota Hiace models with a rear-mounted camera inside the vehicle. Instead of using an infra-red flash, it uses an orange flash-gun when operating at night. As the camera points towards the oncoming traffic, having it go off at you on a dark night is really clever. Destroys your night vision and temporarily blinds you. I've been tempted, should I ever set one off in a car, run into the side of the camera van and sue the cops for wilfully blinding me. Could be an expensive exercise though...

One of the other main issues is inappropriate speed limits. I personally feel that 100km/h is simply too low, despite even the main trunk roads being single carriageway. Arterial routes within major cities (Auckland, mainly) are universally 50km/h. Very very rarely is a road set higher than that, and only when it's a multi-lane divided road with houses or businesses that are set well-back from the road or on side feeder roads. One particular road in Auckland, Tamaki Drive, is aboue a mile and a half long. Two lanes in each direction (not divided) and has just TWO driveways, one of which protected by traffic lights, along its entire length. 50km/h the whole way.

Quite, and given that indicator bulbs spend part of the time NOT emitting light when the indicator control is switched on, I'd imagine there'd be quite a few appeals against any borderline prosecutions for breaking this law...

Interesting selective use of stats.

NZ Road deaths by year:
1998 501
1999 509
2000 462
2001 455
2002 404
2003 459
2004 435

A general downward trend with one trough. To draw the conclusions you have based on one blip is kind of stupid.



http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3296002a10,00.html

Not significantly I suspect.



2nd part is clearly untrue. (using your own source)

Do NZ have speed cameras and civvies operating hairdryers, or do the police do everything?

To draw really meaningful conclusions one needs to examine long term trends - over a number of decades. What we should expect to see is a steady exponential decay in the fatal accident rate figure. In New Zealand, Australia and the UK we have seen the regular and reliable fatality rate decay stall and reverse over the last decade. That's a damn serious conditions and unfortunately it's highly consistent with the sample NZ figures given.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

All the speed limits in New Zealand have a 10kph tolerance, so you will only get prosecuted for 61 and above in a 50 and 111 and above in the national 100 limit. The speed camera vans are operated by civilians, and the total sum of evidence seems to be one picture (usually from the rear) showing an alleged speed, no corroboration or any other technicalities. The only decent feature is the fact that most fines are about thirty pounds, and no points on your licence, and of course it doesn't affect your insurance as this isn't even compulsory.
Having lived in NZ for five years (and the UK for 43), I can reveal to the world that road deaths are nothing to do with speed - the incidence of drivers exceeding a speed limit are much lower than the UK (or at least the UK in 1999), yet hitting other cars is a national sport. I normally see a crash scene every month, I've been run into three times, and a car hitting a power pole plunging people into darkness is frequently in the news.
By far the biggest problem is that most drivers aren't even aware they drive badly, and therefore can't improve.

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jaykay in NZ

Exactly, and in the UK and NZ we see long term falling total no. of deaths and a long term falling death RATE too.



Why? That is a wild, wild assumption.



There clearly is a long term decay with one blip, from which your OP drew his conclusions. (Were all speed cameras installed on the 1st Jan 2002? No speed cameras before then? No "speed kills" adverts before that day either? Please...)

In any case NZ's population grew 7.2% between 1991 & 1996, and a further 3.8% between 1996 & 2001. If it's anything like here the number of vehicle users rose at an even faster rate. So anything lower than that (i.e. what we have seen) would mean the rate of deaths per drivers has actually fallen (i.e. like in the UK).

I KNOW that's totally wrong for the UK and I believe that it's wrong for NZ too.

The UK roads fatality rate fell by between 5 and 7% per annum from earliest record (1950) until about 10 years ago. Over the last decade the fatality rate reduction gradually slowed, stopped and in 2003 finally REVERSED. The rise in the fatal accident rate in the UK in 2003 was the first GENUINE rise in the history of motoring.

I believe NZ figures are behaving similarly, although I haven't really studied them myself.



Of course it isn't a wild assumption. The 'input factors' responsible for the earlier trends are still present.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Again you make the assumption that the decline should follow your extrapolated data. WHY? You have to justify this. It is always dangerous to extrapolate outside the range of data, particularly in this case when there are so many variables.



I thought we had already agreed that we need to look at long periods not single years?



Clearly they are not. NSL was introduced in the 1960s and had an immediate effect. ABS brakes, crash barriers etc. etc. etc. all have immediate effects when they are installed. They are not going to cause the same decline in deaths year on year UNLESS they are being installed at the same rate year on year.

The percentage of cars on the road with ABS, traction control, 'intelligent' braking etc is still rising I suspect (I, for one, have changed my car this year and gained ABS and traction control in the process. Old car is off the road now). Within the last 5 years, impact protection of new cars has also been steadily improving.

Indeed, not to mention that ABS, TC etc. systems are continually being developed and improved, and as people replace their older vehicles with newer ones, they're also replacing their older systems with newer ones. So even if your new vehicle doesn't add any new types of safety system to the ones your old vehicle had, chances are you'll still see an increased safety benefit from having newer versions of the same systems.

Echoing samcro and Twister, the reality is that improvements in roads and vehicle safety come in gradually. It takes years until all the older cars that don't have safety feature X have gone to the Great Driveway In The Sky (and of course they never all go - a handful will be kept by collectors and enthusiasts, road legal and forever lacking modern safety devices). This is because people don't all change their cars at once when they hear a new widget is available, and by the time that the majority have got round to changing the car to one that happens to have safety feature X technology will have moved on and the very newest top of the range cars now have safety feature Y as well. Meantime the motoring press are all talking about safety feature Z that's currently on the drawing board and looks likely to be available on cars in a few years time.

Whether it's improvements in cars or the roads themselves, the improvements arrive gradually and are not all taken up / rolled out in a nice neat bundle. I don't know but I imagine the same applies for medical advances. Hopefully the Mad Mog will chip in with the doctor's perspective. Still, I'm confident that there must have been improvements there as well. From what I saw from being triple nined into A&E six months ago, ambulances seem to be kitted out with lots of stuff with lights and possibly even beeping noises. I'm sure it wasn't all available in the past, and I'm equally sure the NHS wouldn't spend the money on it all if it did no good. What's certain is that these various benefits appear intermittently and independent of one another, and in many cases the benefit from an individual advance may be felt in increments over a number of years. With all these factors going on alongside each other what's so surprising about a rough 5-7% improvement each year?

All in all it's not an unreasonable assumption to expect deaths to have a continual decline. Expecting otherwise is just as much an assumption, if not more so. If we think that deaths would have stopped declining in 1993 and it's nothing to do with the use of speed cameras we must also assume something else: either that by an astonishing coincidence deaths had fallen about as far as practically possible just at the time cameras came along (which isn't good news for the cameras as it means they were redundant almost from the outset), or by an even more incredible coincidence the number of deaths would have begun to increase in 1993 were it not for the introduction of cameras and that in the years since this increase has been very roughly cancelled out by the increased use of cameras. Neither sounds plausible, but if there's any credible evidence for either, or an alternative theory that lets the policy of reliance upon cameras off the hook, we're all ears.

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Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler - Einstein

The so-called fatality gap is a numerical fact. It only remains to determine the cause or causes. We're WAY beyond the assumption stage. It's a hypothesis very closely supported by facts and logic. We have not reached 'proof'.

You might like to examine the outline case on the following website pages:
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/fatality.html
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/effects.html

The experimental model on:
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/factors.html

The relationship between traffic growth and fatality reduction on:
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/smeed.html

And in particular the appendix on:
http://www.safespeed.org.uk/stone.html

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety