A tragic second straight year of more deaths on our roads is extremely sad and troubling, says the Automobile Association.

This year’s road toll was 321 deaths. That is 27 more deaths than last year’s road toll. The number of deaths can vary greatly from year-to-year and the previous five years’ annual road tolls have been:

“We all want less people killed on our roads so to have a second straight year of the road toll going up is awful to see,” says AA Motoring Affairs General Manager Mike Noon.

“The number of deaths and injuries on our roads have dropped a lot from the past but we want that to keep going down and a lot of people right now will be asking questions about why it isn’t.”

Compared to 2014, there were less deaths among cyclists and pedestrians this year but many more motorcyclists, drivers and passengers killed.

No one can conclusively say why there have been more fatal crashes in the last two years but international experience has shown that road deaths can increase when a country’s economy is doing better and fuel prices are low. The number of vehicle kilometres driven in New Zealand has also been increasing again but, ultimately, the most important thing is what can be done to get road deaths heading back down.

The AA is calling for four actions next year to make our roads safer:

• More median barriers and safety barriers on high-risk highways
• Require the safety ratings of vehicles to be displayed by car dealers
• Mandatory alcohol interlocks for repeat drink drivers
• Extend the Visiting Drivers safety programme across the country

“Unfortunately there isn’t a silver bullet to reduce our road toll but if we improve the quality of our roads, get more people into safer vehicles, get drunk and drugged drivers off our roads and get people to make safer choices when they’re behind the wheel then we can have a lot less deaths and injuries.”

New Zealand is not the only country facing a rising road toll, with several states in Australia and global road safety leaders Sweden, the UK and Norway all having had recent years where the number of road deaths went up.

New Zealand still has much higher road death rates than many other countries however and the AA believes we should be aiming to cut the annual road toll to less than 200 deaths by 2020.

For more information contact:

Mike Noon
General Manager Motoring Affairs
New Zealand Automobile Association
M. 021 659 704
E. mnoon@aa.co.nz