Tarmac Carnage

 

This month Toni Marshall rants and raves but it’s okay because it for a very worthy cause!

I was truly astonished when I heard that the Queen’s Birthday weekend road toll was announced as zero. Tragically, it did transpire that a seriously injured motorist did not recover from her injuries and she died two weeks later, this unfortunate loss took the formal road toll to one.
Long holiday weekends are traditionally three days of tarmac carnage and the final tally of lost ones can typically be in the teens. To have a near zero result was fantastically abnormal.
This welcomed anomaly was never really explained but it certainly got me thinking! Surely, changes must be able to be made that could recreate a zero road toll and even make it achievable every weekend!
Appointing myself ‘Minister of Road and Traffic Safety’ for a day, I got to work to identify causes and come up with successful changes to the New Zealand motorists driving behaviours.
My initial thoughts read a lot like a road-safety pamphlet. Our driving behaviours, as a nation, are rubbish!
Far too many of us take the act of driving for granted, hardly applying any real focus to the potentially fatal task of navigating a car from A to B. The recent law to ban cell phone use clearly indicates our casual regard to driving. You would think that a nation intent on keeping safe on the roads would not be on the phone at any time while driving.
A casual review of drivers’ behaviour this week on my local roads revealed some horrific moments that included make-up application, burger eating, phone use, map reading and behaviour management of rear-seated children.
Car control is also very high on the cause-of-accident list. Far too many of us believe that technology has created a fail-safe form of transport. Accordingly, we travel far too fast, far too close to the car in front of us and with total disregard for the conditions.
Respect and courtesy for other road users make up the last element of the trinity of road safety commandments. Strangely enough, this last element is the most critical as it is the obnoxious behaviour of many road users that create the moments of madness that lead to many of our road deaths.
Given this very simple and short list of behaviour, change must be within easy reach and I believe it is! As a nation, we simply make having a drivers’ licence a privilege not a right!
Forget the fines and demerit points. Let’s fight fire with fire and begin to take away the privilege of driving from those who are putting the rest of us at risk.
Just imagine how quickly those still driving and texting/phoning would stop this reckless behaviour if the consequence were to lose their licence. How much safer would we all be if we applied the true legal speed limits at all times and with zero tolerance for those who chose to speed. Speedsters, too, would lose their licences.
The loss of so many already this year, 150 lives, is a disgrace! While our police continue to pamper licensed drivers, there will be no change, just more deaths on our roads. You, like me, will continue to take risks, be distracted, become impatient and generally behave poorly on our roads because there is no accountability. Until there is, it is unlikely that we will have another zero road toll long weekend, ever!

Toni Marshall