Michael Batson

Never mind the traffic in Ho Chi Minh City or murderous roads in Bolivia, driving in New Zealand can be just as lethal.

New statistics show New Zealand road deaths are among the highest in the world per capita, alongside Cambodia, Malaysia, Lithuania and Slovenia.

Per capita, Kiwi road deaths last year were the ninth highest, with 8.9 deaths for every 100,000 residents. These figures are higher than for the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Hungary and more than double the figures of Norway, Israel, the Netherlands, Sweden and Britain. Malaysia had the highest ratio, with 23.8 deaths, while Britain had the lowest at 3.8.

The problem in New Zealand is largely caused by the nation driving first world cars on predominantly second world roads by at times, third world drivers. According to the Automobile Association upgrading the country's "unforgiving" road network would make a significant difference in improving road safety, as many roads were carrying double the traffic volume they were designed for.

New Zealand’s roads are largely two lanes, with one in each direction but with no separation or barrier between the oncoming traffic. The number of overtaking lanes has increased in recent years, but there still aren’t enough of them, so drivers perform overtaking manouevres in the face of oncoming traffic. I can recall driving from Christchurch north to Picton in the South Island and after leaving the outskirts of Christchurch not seeing an overtaking lane at all. At one point the main highway consists of a single-lane wooden bridge over which all traffic must pass.

According to transport authorities, the leading cause of crashes is poor observation, including driver distraction, inattention and fatigue. Services as exist in European countries with their highly developed motorway systems, don’t really exist in New Zealand, which to be fair has a much smaller population. Building motorways would prohibitively expensive in country with just over four million people. Adding to the cost would be the topography. New Zealand is mountainous in parts and dominated by a series of ranges which would mean the added cost of building numerous bridges and tunnels.

Contributing to the carnage on the country’s roads is the fact the intercity travel passes through numerous small towns and rural areas with access roads to settlements running directly to and from the main roads, so vehicles are constantly turning onto and off the main highways, often across the path of oncoming traffic. Add to this what police refer to as “roadside furniture”, signs, telegraph poles, parked vehicles, livestock and various other potential obstacles.

New Zealand drivers often don’t appear altogether familiar with the road rules. For example, the give way rule at intersections in New Zealand is that turning traffic gives way to traffic coming straight on and you are required to give way to traffic on your right turning right, which is the opposite to virtually every other country surveyed.

To prove this lack of attention to rules, police once set up a traffic camera on a busy intersection in the capital, Wellington. The intersection was peculiar because it has four stop signs one at each corner. The stop signs effectively cancel each other out, so drivers therefore are reliant on the give way rules to proceed. On a single day, the camera snapped over90 drivers who either didn’t know the rules, or chose to ignore them. Some drivers who did obey the give way rules were abused by other drivers convinced the others were in the wrong.

New Zealand can be a great country to drive around. The road from Haast in south Westland to Wanaka is one of the most spectacular I’ve been on. All the way tourists in their ubiquitous camper vans are parked up on the roadsides admiring the views. This brings with it another hazard encountered on New Zealand’s roads, also sometimes seen on Australian roads too, tourists used to left-hand drive vehicles suddenly appearing on the wrong side of the road. So frequently was this occurring that rental firms have taken to installing reminder stickers on the dashboards of their vehicles to remind overseas drivers to keep to the left hand side of the road.

The use of handsets in cars has now been banned. All mobiles in cars must now be hands free. This legislation has been around for awhile in other countries but is a fairly recent addition in New Zealand. A spectacular example of why this legislation was necessary occurred when actor Cliff Curtis, who has starred opposite the likes of George Clooney in Three Kings, Johnny Depp in Blow and Nicolas Cage and Ving Rhames in Bringing Out The Dead, drove his four-wheel-drive vehicle through the side of a house, later admitting he’d been distracted sending a text message. Luckily nobody was in the house at the time, but the owners got a shock later when they returned home.

Adding to the traffic on the country’s roads are the size and amount of trucks moving freight. Some of these behemoths weigh over 40 tonnes carried over eight axles with two trailers, the so-called B-trains. Their speed supposedly is capped at 90 kilometres per hour. They snake their way along the country's narrow highways. Thier sheer weight chews up the bitumen, and on certain corners great strips of tyres stripped from the rims, have been deposited on to the roadside. On hills, cars get stuck in behind them and on the flats you have to increase speed to over 100 kilometres an hour to pass them.

Overtaking lanes, assuming they exist, are too short to allow more than a handful of vehicles to pass in any one spot, which can lead to some drivers taking absurd risks to pass, endangering themselves and others. To be fair, most truckies are more than competent behind the wheel, they have to be. They are after all, professional drivers, albeit forced to operate in the main, on wholly inadequate thoroughfares.

In a tragic and ironic event, the top traffic police officer in New Zealand was killed when hit by a truck as he rode his bicycle home after work. A career spent trying to improve road safety sadly came to an abrupt end.

Driving can bring out the best and worst in people. Stopping to assist a driver who has broken down or helping an elderly person change a flat tyre are examples of the humanitarian side of drivers. Racial stereotyping of drivers is an example of the less desirable side of human nature. Violent acts of retribution or road rage, is another, be it verbal of physical.

Driving etiquette is something less seen in New Zealand. Leaving a space in a line of traffic so others can exit driveways or turn into another street is something that frustratingly occurs all too infrequently. Little exists in the way of driver education for driving on motorways. There aren’t a lot of motorways in the county but they do exist in Auckland and Wellington. People treat them like any other stretch of road, often using the inside or fast lanes for cruising along often below the speed limit, frustrating those behind.

Traffic woes exist in Auckland, the country’s largest city. Years ago, city planners decided against Wellington’s rail template and gave the city over to the urban sprawl dominated by the motor vehicle. The result today are constant traffic jams, estimated to cost the economy hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Consecutive civic administrations have sought a solution in yet more roads, a policy that has failed in every location globally where this has been tried. The city has a barely functioning public transport network, and uniquely for its size of over one million inhabitants has no rail network joining the international airport with the central city.

Years ago they baulked at the $150 million price tag to put a road tunnel under the central city, today that cost has escalated to over $1 billion, still with no plans in sight to remedy the congestion. To be fair the city’s traffic woes pale in comparison to the situation found in other cities around the world. Anyone who’s been to Bangkok will testify to that.

New Zealand’s tragic road statistics are fuelled by another constant, alcohol. For years, the country’s largest breweries insisted on building large booze barns with great car parks outside, while authorities carried on a campaign designed to stop drink driving accidents. Rural roads are particularly vulnerable. New Zealand’s wild terrain can mean a wrong turn results in a vehicle careering down some bush covered gully where the driver, if hurt, may lie unaided for hours and day in some cases.

I still fell safer on New Zealand roads than on roads in some other countries. Memories of buses overtaking at speed on blind mountain corners with a startling precipice to one side in Peru springs to mind. Traffic in Cambodia where they often drive on both sides of the road at once, and where traffic lights are observed haphazardly does little to inspire confidence or safety. The locust-like swarms of motorcycles on Vietnamese cities, where traffic jams are avoided by riding along footpaths can draw a few nervous moments if you’re a pedestrian. Cairo seemed to be one big road works. Every change of lane or gear shift is invariably accompanied by a blast on the horn, a constant cacophony of sound that tests patience and sanity alike.

The lesson is nowhere is100 percent safe. When vehicles were first produced in America and there were only five on the roads in the whole country, two of them still managed to collide.

New Zealand has one of the highest car ownership ratios to population in the world, so it’s inevitable that reliance on vehicles has consequences, unfortunately often fatal or injurious to those using them. With the evidence to date, it looks unfortunately like those grim statistics are set to continue.