The government is working on a new road safety strategy to bring about substantial road safety improvements in New Zealand. Video first released in December 2019.
Lives are being lost because police are unable to control drunk driving and speeding, says an international expert who has studied road safety in Auckland.
The heat around the road deaths is on the rise, with a top police officer acknowledging that the police have not done a good enough job and that the government is demanding responsibility.
“Currently, the price paid for the extensive redistribution of traffic police in general tasks … is additional alcohol and speeding deaths on Auckland roads each year – of the order of more than four to five lives,” he concluded. Australian road safety consultant Eric Howard. in a 2021 report for Auckland Transport (AT).
Across the country, better use of radars could save more than 50 lives, he calculated.
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Transport Minister Michael Wood said a ministerial oversight group would meet with executives, including Police Commissioner Andrew Coster, on enforcement levels.
Australian 123rf road safety expert Eric Howard says more speed limits need to be applied to save lives, especially in Auckland.
“We will continue to work through this forum to clarify government expectations, monitor progress and provide support where we can,” Wood said.
“The police have made it clear that they need to improve their traffic police performance across the country, including in Auckland.”
Howard’s report was a continuation of the one he wrote in 2018, which presented recommendations for improving road safety in the city. Many of the recommendations based on the actions of central government agencies, including the police, did not materialize.
“No one in authority seems to take this seriously,” said Auckland politician and former police inspector George Wood, a member of Devonport-Takapuna Local Council.
Simon Maude / Stuff Devonport-Takapuna, a member of the Local Council and a former police inspector, George Wood, wrote to the police about the number of people dying on the roads in Auckland.
After reading Howard’s report and noticing that 62 people died on the roads in Auckland in September 2021, George Wood wrote to the police asking for help in his area.
He pointed out that only half of the breath tests that police said he would do in Auckland last year had been carried out, and speed cameras had disappeared from some areas.
As of 2020, there are no fixed rooms in the Waitematā East police area, which covers much of the North Shore, where Wood’s voters live.
In the Auckland City Police District, there were only three fixed rooms in 2021.
LAWRENCE SMITH / Superintendent Naila Hassan, Waitematā District Commander, acknowledged that the traffic police “could have been better”.
George Wood received a response from the Waitematā District Commander, Commander Naila Hassan, who acknowledged that certain aspects of police enforcement were not good enough.
“The police acknowledge that our performance in breathing testing and speeding could have been better in previous years, and we are committed to improving that,” Hassan wrote.
During Level 3 and 4 blockages, there were no checkpoints for breath testing, but Hassan acknowledged that Covid “had only a small impact on our overall performance.”
The location of the fixed radars was a decision based on accident data, she wrote.
Police figures analyzed by Stuff show that road traffic was in decline in Auckland long before Covid-19.
In the Auckland region, the number of people caught for alcohol-related offenses in 2021 was 5179, down for the fourth year in a row, less than half of what it was in 2009.
The number of speeding crimes issued by mobile cameras in 2021 was 125,406, down from 371,768 in 2014.
Tickets for fixed cameras decreased by 25% compared to 2020 and decreased by almost 200,000 compared to the 2019 figure of 398,714.
In his report, Howard called on the authorities to step up the use of radars, especially in Auckland, and