The AA has set out a 10 point action plan for improving road safety:
Safe drivers
• Introduce saliva-based roadside drugged driving testing.
• Increase rehabilitation treatment for recidivist drunk drivers.
• Extend the minimum learner licence period to 12 months rather than six months.
Yes to the first two, but I am less enthusiastic about the third.
Now the licence age has been raised extending the learner period would make it difficult for young people in the country to get their full licence before they leave school which often means leaving home too.
Safe vehicles
• Raise the safety standards of imported vehicles requiring new cars to have electronic stability control and a minimum NCAP crash rating of 4 stars and used cars to have at least a 3 star NCAP rating or meet suitable safety standards.
Safe roads and roadsides
• Reprioritise transport spending so an extra $150 million a year is spent on low-cost road safety engineering improvements.
• Dedicate any new traffic fine revenue to road safety initiatives.
A lot more median barriers would be helpful too.
I’d also like more attention paid to the placement of passing lanes. It’s very dangerous when they run out on corners or the brow of a hill and it would be safer to have them in only one direction on any stretch of road without a median barrier.
Safe speeds
• Make fixed speed cameras more visible to drivers and signpost fixed speed camera areas.
• Introduce red light cameras in all major cities.
The suggestion to improve the visibility of fixed speed cameras was made recently and predictably got the response that all that does is slow people down until they’ve passed them.
The same argument might be made for mobile ones. The sight of a police car does tend to slow traffic down but it usually speeds up again when drivers think they’re out of range.
Trials suggest cameras do help prevent red light-jumping.
Deaths and injuries as a result of road accidents have human and financial costs. Safer drivers and safer roads should reduce both.
Homepaddock 
Safe speeds
• Make fixed speed cameras more visible to drivers and signpost fixed speed camera areas.
At the very least (to prove they’re doing more than revenue gathering) the police should place highly visible fixed cameras at all accident black spots.
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Fielding – signs with the accident/injury/death count might be even more effective.
There’s a sign in the Lindis Pass warning that it’s an accident black spot and it does seem to make drivers take more care.
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Not sure if regulations concerning used car imports need tightening any further.
I return from exile in Pomgolia in a month or so and I was to bring my 2004 Jaguar X-type back with me.
But on checking the EC plates the AA told me it would not meet both emissions and crash safety standards.
And to think of the crap I have had before, including one 1996 import from Japan, that was fresh off the boat when I bought it in 2006.
None were upto the standards of my beloved Jaguar!
The only car I have had from this century!!
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Isn’t it funny how “reducing the road toll” inevitably leads to more revenue generating opportunities for the
parasitesgovernment.Fact: the Road Toll circa 2011 is about half what it was circa 1966
The reason for this substantial improvement is engineering not new laws, not speed cameras but better roads and better cars,
Better roads cost money whereas speed cameras generate revenue as will the red light cameras, which wont save a single life but will lead to a proliferation of new controlled intersections providing new income opportunities to be misspent in part on finding new opportunities to screw over the citizens of this land.
Fact: over 20% of the fatalities on our roads are people over sixty – this is not a group it is politically viable to knock, unlike the young which is why Crusher Collins hasn’t postured over crushing pensioner’s cars.
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Forget it. NZ is stuffed.
Almost every NZer worships at the altar of big government and without a thought to alternative measures, immediately leap to the solution of more regulation as the answer to very perceived problem.
See the rising numbers of people who are quitting this basket case country? Soon it will be populated only by drooling morons reminiscent of the goons in the onetime Soviet Union who still yearn for Stalin’s return.
From a nation of proud independent people to a bunch of lilly-livered knock-kneed slaves in a few well manipulated generations.
Disgusting to observe. Is there a mind in NZ that still thinks for itself?
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Buldrick, Buldrick, enough enough
Yes Sir,
You are sounding Redbaiter
Yes Sir, Yes Sir
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Next the AA could call for a return of the Red Flag.
Vehicle speeds could be retricted to walking speeds and someone could walk in front waving a red flag to warn people a car was approaching.
Just think of all the jobs this could create.
It might solve youth unemployment overnight!
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