by frog
A Herald survey of 2,300 people has shown that 80% favour raising the driving age to 18.
It’s hard to work out how representative that survey truly is but 80% seems unbelievably high. Raising the age to 18 would be a huge step up from the current age of 15.
It’s more likely the government will raise the driving age to 17. They’ll also probably give young people living in highly isolated rural areas the ability to apply sooner.
You’ll find out when the government releases their new Road Safety Strategy till 2020 in February.
It’s great to see Joyce taking such a strong line on road safety. However, as Kevin’s submission outlines, the Transport Agency’s current focus on how to improve road safety seems a little unbalanced.
The Greens would like to see a stronger focus on improving pedestrian and cyclist safety. Also a wider understanding of what road safety actually means. For example, scientists estimate air pollution from motor vehicles kills as many people in NZ prematurely as road accidents. So why doesn’t the road safety discussion document mention them at all?
What do you think the drivers age should be? And what would your top priority measures to improve road safety be?
Published in Environment & Resource Management by frog on Mon, January 11th, 2010
Tags: driving age, health, Kevin Hague, safety, transport
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Drink driving among adults has become socially unacceptable. Has it become unacceptable among teenagers and twenty-somethings? If not, getting a handle on alcohol (which is currently under review) might help a lot.
The really effective measure, which I know we can’t do, would be to transfer risk back to the driver by putting a six inch spike in the middle of the steering wheel. I haven’t found a link, but my attitude to this is informed by rumours that:
– snow driving, which cases a lot of small damage to cars, reinforcing a perception of danger, comes with a low collision death rate
– countries which change the side of the road they drive on have temporary (a few years) dips in the road death rate, while people recover from their awareness that driving is dangerous
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
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@jc2 from personal experience I have found drink driving is more common amount non-youth, not sure of exact brackets but probably something like: 20-25 and 40+. The people this would affect (15-18) are generally well behaved with regards to drinking and driving but then I might have only experienced a select group.
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The government would be sensible to set an age of 17 with an exception for rural areas. It would also be reasonable to allow 16 year olds to ride scooters and small motorcycles (I started on a bike, and it gave me an appreciation of the hazards of road use. Also, motorcyclists are less likely to injure and damage others, which is my main concern).
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There is no need to have separate rules for [edit:colloquial term for farmers] , let them buy a scooter and a raincoat if they need to go to town.
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Step one is to admit that the target of 300 for this year was computed in 2000 when every government agency expected oil to return to less than $20bbl and traffic growth rates to return to 1990s levels. Consequently the actual target of 6.1 deaths per billion vkt was multiplied by 49 billion, which is considerably more than the 42 billion estimate for this year derived from MfE and Transit data. Thus the target for the year to date is no more than 7 deaths yet 15 people are already dead, mostly slaughtered on the government’s own roads.
Step two – confess that last 2008 saw a 30% reduction in road deaths when petrol prices soared above $2 litre and that this cause-effect relationship has occurred everytime there has been an abrupt increase in petrol prices all the way back to Nordy’s Black Budget. Immediately add a 50cent/litre road safety tax to fund the next steps.
Step three – admit that high petrol prices have prevented the police from delivering the number of enforcement hours stated in the strategy despite funding being increased to the specified amount, anounce an immdeiate 25% increase in funding.
Step four – admit that funding for highway safety improvements has been slashed instead of being maintained at 1999 levels as stated in the strategy, announce an immediate 250% increase in funding.
Step five – apologise for the increase in drunk-driving following the diversion of booze-buses to high-profile blitzes of the minor “boy-racer” safety problem and resurrect the successful late 1990s CBT actions, especially in small towns.
Step six – don’t let minor problems such as cellphones and corner-cutting distract the police from targetting the proven problem area of seatbelt compliance.
Step seven – copy two vital initiatives from Sweden – raise the driving age to 16 and lower the alcohol limit to .02
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PS. The actual (Swedish rounding) target of 260 is lower than the road tolls in every year since the end of war time petrol rationing in 1950.
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I’m all for reducing the blood alcohol level that people can drive with, especially for young and/or inexperienced drivers.
Given that many Kiwi kids do leanr todrive young, why dont we have Drivers Ed in schools?
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The statistics show that a lot of accidents are caused by young drivers, so the temptation is to solve this by raising the driving age. However young drivers are also inexperienced drivers, so how do the statistics of older inexperienced drivers (late starters) compare? Would raising the starting age merely shift the problem? How do we increase the experience of our new drivers safely?
I would suggest increasing the learner driver period and increasing the age at which a driver can obtain a restricted licence. In other words, allow them to drive under supervision when they are young, but not to graduate to driving on their own until 17 or so.
The idea of low-power scooters and motorcycles for country driving is a recipe for rear-end collisions!
Trevor.
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dbuckley –
we did have drivers’ ed in schools, it was paid for by the prospective drivers; I got my license that way at the end of high school, aged 17. Most of the service providors quit the industry in the 90′s due to excessive replacement costs for cars that were totalled by kids with far too much confidence and too little ability. Private driving instructors have a careful disclaimer and very high fees, as a result of the re-structuring due to high on-going costs.
Provincial centres seemed to do that better than the main cities, possibly because our public transport was crap & you had to drive to be able to get home from anything after work. (Or cycle, as most of us continued to do anyway, drivers’ license notwithstanding)
Frog -
Since more of our population is urban than rural these days, the old saw that ‘rural kids need to be able to drive’ is not likely to wash with this generation; however, if it’s only being done to stop the urban ‘boy-racer’ menace, perhaps a change to the laws governing car loans would be more effective – can’t pay for exhorbitantly priced fast car? Then take the bus…
Currently it’s far too easy for parents to guarantee a car loan for their teenage offspring, so that they don’t have to continue to run a taxi service at all hours of the day and night.
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IMO the best way to reduce the road toll is to reduce the number of car drivers
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My licence to drive law
1. That can only be a full licence from age 18.
2. That there is a one year provisional licence for the first year of driving (at whatever age).
3. Provisional licences should be available from age 15 in rural areas (last for 3 years).
4. Provisional licences in other areas should come in from either age 16 (2 years) or age 17 (1 year).
5. Those on provisional licences – whatever their age have a zero blood alcohol level and they have no right to transport alcohol in their vehicles.
6. There should be a curfew (hours of use limitation) on provisional licence holders.
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Careful Rimu – your comment will appear on Kiwiblog with Farrar claiming that the Greens want to shoot half of all New Zealand car drivers!
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“My” preferred general policy is
1. to encourage longer peak hour periods and car pooling to ease congestion.
2. mandatory “fixing” of cars (and any car subsequently owned for a set perod of time) to prevent a drunk driving after a drink drive conviction (the persons license only being valid for a fixed car).
And as already mentioned
3. increased funding of road safety work.
4. higher petrol taxes (to fund road construction costs, road maitenance costs, road safety work, road use policing, road accident ambulance costs and public health costs from accidents and also ACC/Invalids Benefits costs).
5. compulsory third party insurance.
I am not convinced about changing the blood alcohol level for those over 18.
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Sounds great to me. Then when they get a car they might extend some courtesy toward those not encased in steel.
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I do agree with what SPC said.. make a good limitations or restriction for those who are 15-18 years old drivers.. and give some considerations for those who are in the rural areas.
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Actually Rimu, there is another way. Increase the number of cars on the road so that it becomes impossible to speed. The statistics are clear. Fatal crashes decrease as traffic becomes denser. The fender-benders increase, but because people are constrained to travel at the same speed the relative velocities when they touch are small enough that no real damage is done…
Not that I think this is a good way do “reduce the road toll”.
respectfully
BJ
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SPC
No need to increase it, just make the government put ALL the petrol tax back into roading. Currently it goes into and disappears into the consolidated fund.
There should be a seperate roading fund established so that the gathering and spending of the petrol tax is completely transparent.
Will that become Green policy?
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If they want to fix the boy racer problem the answer is simple, remove the right to high performance vehicles.
As a learner driver have a max cc rating for a vehicle that must not be exceeded (like they have for motor bikes) and must not be modified from factory specs.
For older “boy racers” the court system is clearly not working so instead of crushing cars (or in addition to it) revoke the right to own certain vehicles. Can’t see many boy racers feeling to cool in an 1100 cc suzuki and any performance modifications would be illegal and result in loss of licence.
This way the boy racers can’t grizzel that they can’t get to work and we don’t have to worry about some Nissan skyline drifting around the next blind corner.
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Shunda! Banner!
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@ trevor29.
That’s a good question as to whether young drivers crash more because they are young or because they are inexperienced.
The Safer Journeys discussion document released by NZTA states that “Driving experience reduces crash risk over time. However, the combination of driving inexperience and immaturity makes the crash risk higher for young novice drivers than for older novice drivers.”
They don’t give statistics to back that statement up but I think it is likely to be true.
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1. Raise the driving age until you can afford 3rd party insurance, i.e. when insurance companies actually are willing to insure you
2. Phase out old cars sooner, that’ll make driving in general safer too
3. Have zero alcohol limit for all drivers
4. Introduce a drink or drive licence system, i.e. choose between a driver’s licence (if you qualify) or a drinker’s licence. You can’t have both at the same time but can switch (at 12noon) so you decide whether to drink or drive that day. Possession of both results in the loss of both
5. Driving lessons (and road behaviour instruction) should become part of the core curriculum at school instead of expensive (and often useless when done by family members) private instruction
6. All current drivers should be able to pass a road rules test at all times with testing by traffic police every time they stop divers for infractions. This to prevent road rules to be “forgotten’ by drivers after they have sat their only driving exam.
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Make copies of the latest road rules available at entry points to the county (ports and international airports).
Include a list of pending and recent road rule changes with reminder notices for vehicle registrations and hand them out with warrants of fitness/certificates of fitness.
Trevor.
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How about having everybody report to a driving test centre before they go out each day? Then they could:
- have a short written test
- and a practical, maybe on a simulator
- have their identity confirmed
- be breathalysed and drug tested
- have a psychological test to make sure they’re in a suitable frame of mind to drive
- have their vehicle checked out
That would eliminate accidents, apart from those caused by genuine inattention.
Or we could just get over ourselves. Lets face it, we’ll all die someday, probably of cancer or heart disease. A perfect world where nothing bad happens just isn’t achievable, however many laws we invent to try and perfect human behaviour.
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Gerrit
I cannot speak for a party I am not even a member of, but I have no problem with all money paid in petrol tax (and other road user charges)being set aside for
road construction costs, road maitenance costs, road safety work, road use policing and drivers education, road accident ambulance costs, and public health costs from accidents and also ACC/Invalids Benefits costs, land and building costs for car parking and contribution to funding public transport and any Kyoto/environment costs caused.
Then we would not need to borrow to finance road projects and the like – nor would tolls be required (if the one petrol tax covered all).
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Frog –
sadly, I had a year in the public service as a clerical assistant for the MOT regional prosecutions section, where I handled every accident file in the Wellington Region.
The fact you quoted is real; the reason is not quite as obvious as it might seem, but here goes – young men between the ages of 15 – 25 die on our roads at a higher rate than mortality in any other causal sector; the reason accident rates go down as age rises is that we generally kill the ones who aren’t smart enough/have a deathwish, before they achieve the age of 25.
I left that job after nearly a year, sick at heart about what I’d learnt about male life expectancy on our roads, and became the world’s worst front-seat passenger for about a decade – I still knew most of the Wellington cops by name for at least 5 years, and I still find the Police attitude to traffic law reprehensible; I had to work with officers who actually actively wished death on some of the regular offenders, ‘cos they got so self-righteous about the failure of said offenders to modify behaviour that transgressed the law.
During that time, I was also a union rep with the PSA, when our workplace was suffering from absent staff due to traffic officers being punted off their motorbikes on the motorway – instant trip to A&E – by some of the local gangs. This resulted in some officers doing double-shifts on occasion, because the roster could not be filled for weekend duties – a health and safety issue for the union.
Our roads are frequently not well-maintained, are frequently not good enough for travel at the speed limit, let alone above the speed limit, and our society insists that it is every job-attending adults’ right to drive fast to get to work. We will not change this until the fuel situation makes public transport an inevitable replacement for private cars, and we remake our society to handle that fact.
In the meantime, young men continue to die in inordinate numbers on our roads, and young women are starting to catch up. My hope is that we change, as a society, before this affects every family in the country.
Caveat
Note for the observant: none of my children have had a Driver’s Licence before they left secondary school, and only one of them currently holds one, but her husband drives her places more than she uses it!
I currently hold a Drivers’ Licence, but don’t own a vehicle, so use it infrequently, preferring public transport, cycling and walking.
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A regular complaint I have is round-abouts and traffic islands which have been planted with beautifying shrubbery and/or have large signage – both of which obscure a driver’s vision of the indicators of oncomming vehicles and in some cases entire sports cars.
Trevor.
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Yes! I absolutely hate round abouts with sufficient planting so as to block out indicators! Even worse when, like the one outside my house, the only thing it doesn’t really block out is trucks and SUV’s.
On the up side though, it does look pretty and provide a convenient place for youthful/drunken indiscretion.
As a bicyclist large fences on corners pi$$ me off too. They are so dangerous cause those women in SUV’s come around the corner rather fast and stop just before the road ready to turn in. Right over where any bicyclist may have been biking prior to becoming a pancake.
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Re-brand Defensive Driving courses and call them High Performance Driving courses. That should the attract the people who need them most to attend. Then tailor the course to teach them how to drive REALLY WELL. Turn them into, you know, performance drivers. The fact is that high performance driving is defensive driving.
Further maybe the driving test should be done on a simulator where any number of undesirable scenarios can,and do, occur and test the applicants ability to the limit (and beyond?).
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Use technology to catch and fine the drivers who don’t follow the road rules until their behaviour improves. If they collect too many fines and don’t pay them, disqualify them from driving until the fines are paid. If they then drive while disqualified, impound or clamp the car. If they borrow someone elses car and drive that while disqualified, jail them!
Set up video cameras and high resolution digital cameras on some street lights, looking both upstream and downstream. Use high speed digital processing to catch frames of the licence plates of the various vehicles using the high resolution digital cameras. Also use high speed digital processing of the video signals to analyse the behaviour of the vehicles to detect speeding, following too closely and unsafe lane changes. Hold several seconds of video in RAM and if the digital processing detects an infringement, dump the video RAM and the high resolution images to a hard drive for later viewing and ticket issue. (Send this data on a small CD-ROM along with the ticket to the offender.)
Fit all commercial vehicles with GPS and dataloggers that record the position and velocity along with the driver’s details (RFID tags in driver’s licences?). Analyse the position and velocity data from the GPS to detect infringements. Fine drivers who persistantly exceed the speed limits. (Use computer processing to determine when the vehicle has been driven in lower speed limit areas from the GPS position information.)
Fit some commercial vehicles (including buses and some taxis) with external cameras, GPSs and a video buffer along with a button and microphone by the driver. When the driver hits the button, save the last few seconds and the next few seconds of video and audio along with the GPS data to hard drive for later processing and ticket issue, but the tickets are not issued to this driver. Instead, the commercial driver will drive normally and if some clown commits an obvious act of bad driving, the driver hits the button and says what it was that attracted attention, such as cutting in front too closely, failing to give way, failing to keep left, obstructing other traffic, etc, so the tickets would be issued to the owners of those vehicles. Not all commercial drivers would have the required temperament to use such a system sensibly but those that do could be rewarded for their services.
Just some ideas…
Trevor
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Trevor
I like but it will be somewhat dear to do some of it too.
You need to harden the external boxes and you will need to use DSPs to keep up if you plan to analyze traffic for possible infractions in real time… and I would LOVE to take on the task of programming the things to do it but I don’t expect to see it happen at all.
For the catch boxes on the vehicles it is more simple and feasible.
respectfully
BJ
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Katie, Good post. The gender and age aspects of the road toll are very poorly understood but very popular targets for older voters. The overrepresentation of males did not start with the arrival of the motorcar – in the late 1800s the government recorded a “drowned while fording rivers or streams” road toll. Over 90% of the victims were men although only two-thirds of the settler population were male.
Teenagers top the tables for roads deaths for every mode of transport even when exposure is taken into account. When the compulsory seatbelt wearing law was introduced it had an dramatic impact on teenage drivers and their parents age group (35-54) even whilst the bill was being debated in Parliament. When the restricted licence scheme was introduced deaths of teenage drivers fell dramaticly although deaths of teenage passengers didn’t fall at all. Drivers deaths in the 20-24 age group began falling dramaticly three years later. Clearly teenage drivers (and their parents) do benefit from appropriate attitude modifying laws. The fact that teenage passenger, pedestrian and cycle deaths did not improve after the resticted licence scheme was introduced suggests very strongly that half the young “driver” problem is actually caused by older drivers.
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Automated systems could pay for themselves in a few years from the fines and reduction in accident costs. See
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/6676895/lead-footed-drivers-keep-speed-cameras-busy/
which states that speed cameras resulted in $30 million worth of tickets being issued.
There is also a manpower saving in enforcement of speeding and related offences by frontline police.
I wouldn’t mind being part of the development team either.
Trevor.
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Another pet peeve I have is road signs and in some cases traffic lights being obscured by trees and power poles. Seeing a “70kmph” advisory sign as you pass it at 90kmph doesn’t help much – you need to be able to see it early enough to reduce speed before the sign and the corner.
Getting rid of some of the poles that line the edge of the carriage way would also help – both with visibility and also with the consequences of driver error. Some poles only carry a couple of phone wires.
Trevor.
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