Speed Kills? Or Does It

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Jun 8, 2013

For more than two decades the New Zealand public has been sold the claim that “speed kills” – now new international road crash data is showing higher speed limits may actually save lives

Ian Wishart at Investigate Magazine

When New Zealand drivers turn on their tel-
evision sets each evening, chances are
they’ll see at least one advertisment featur-
ing a car slamming into a car/pole/wall/child. The inherent message? The same as it’s been since 1974 – “Speed Kills”. Sure, the pictures may have become more graphic, but the underlying tone has always been that speed of any kind kills.

So haunting are the images that there is probably not a mother in the country who doesn’t think about it. But what if it was all a crock? What if the researchers behind the road safety campaigns had jumped to the wrong conclusions about road fatalities two decades ago, and created a very slick, very persuasive advertising message that was utterly wrong? As New Zealanders who remember the erroneous “one father in four is a child rapist” Telethon campaign of 1988 already know, neither Governments nor advertising agencies are infallible, and the old computer adage “put junk in, get junk out” applies.

So let’s get to the crunch: cold hard facts on the effect of speed on the road toll.

In the early 1970s, as a result of the 1973 oil shock, both New Zealand and the United States imposed new, lower speed limits in an effort to save fuel. In New Zealand’s case the limit dropped from 60 mph (100ks) to 50mph (80ks), while in the US it dropped to 55 mph – the so-called “double nickel”.

In the ten years leading up to the drop in the New Zealand speed limit, an average of 608 New Zealanders had died on the roads each year.

In the ten years that followed the drop from 100 kph down to 80 kph, an average of 707 New Zealanders died on the roads each year: in other words, the new, lower New Zealand speed limit coincided with a 17% increase in road deaths. Starting to get the picture?

Then, in 1985, the New Zealand Government decided to raise the speed limit again, from 80kph back up to 100kph. The result?

Well, admittedly there was a big jump in road deaths that year as people got used to driving their cars faster, but it also coincided with boom times in the economy and a big increase in drink-driving offences.

However, over the next ten years, the average number of New Zealanders killed on the roads each year was 699, a slight drop when compared with the ten years under a lower speed limit.

Could it actually be that allowing cars to drive faster decreases the road toll overall? Sure, the chances of surviving a crash at a higher speed were much slimmer for those involved, but perhaps the higher speeds contributed to smoother traffic flows and less road rage.

One of the reasons that road toll statistics supplied by the old Ministry of Transport, and latterly the LTSA, have been misleading is because the LTSA does not measure “deaths per vehicle kilometre travelled”, which is the only true measure of whether the road toll is really going up or down.

For example, if 1000 people die on the roads each year, during which time the nation’s cars have travelled a million kilometres, the ratio is one death per thousand kilometres. You can then compare that figure to a subsequent year when, perhaps, 1100 people were killed but (because of cheaper petrol maybe) the nation’s cars travelled 1.3 million kilometres.

The LTSA would simplistically tell the public “the road toll has increased”, without realising that the “death per kilometre ratio” has dropped to 1 per 1181 kilometres. The truth in such a situation is that the road toll has dropped in real terms, by about 20 percent.

The closest New Zealand gets to any worthwhile statistics at all are the figures that measure the ratio of deaths to the number of cars on the road.

And more at the National Motorists Association in the US: http://www.motorists.org/ma/kill.html

And at: http://www.motorists.org/press/montana-no-speed-limit-safety-paradox