The Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) is committed to reducing both the number and severity of injuries on the road. With research assistance from the Land Transport Safety Authority (LTSA), ACC wants to dispel some myths about the impact of speed on New Zealanders’ health and well-being. This document provides a substantial research base to New Zealand’s consideration of speeding as a safety issue, and the sorts of strategies that can be employed to reduce speed. It draws conclusions based on research and on injury prevention principles, and is the key resource for ACC’s Down With Speed Programme. The ten points outlined at the front of this document are being used as the basis for a series of presentations, and a supporting leaflet, promoted by ACC to a range of organisations within the community. Through the Down With Speed Programme, ACC hopes to increase understanding of the harmful impact that speeding has on our lives, and to encourage New Zealanders to do more to reduce that impact. We need first to recognise that motor vehicles have provided individuals and communities with very high levels of mobility, by increasing the distance that is able to be travelled during any given period and decreasing the time it takes to get from one place to another. The increasing mobility that the world has seen over the last hundred years has, however, brought with it a terrific loss of life on the road. Tragically for those who survive road crashes, one of the greatest losses is often physical mobility itself. The mobility that motor vehicles provide comes at a very high cost to personal and community safety. Speed is the central factor in any consideration of the trade-off between safety and mobility within the road transport system. This is because speed affects every part of the system. Roads are generally designed to safely facilitate travel at a specific speed. Vehicles are designed to allow people and goods to move at a range of different speeds depending on the circumstance. And people constantly make choices about the speed they drive a vehicle on a road. In this document, speed is considered in terms of “excess speed and inappropriate speed”. “Excess speed” refers to instances when vehicles travel in excess of the legally declared speed limit. “Inappropriate speed” refers to instances when vehicles travel at a speed that is unsuitable for the road and traffic conditions. As the European Transport Safety Council noted in its 1995 report, “the distinction is important because a speed limit… declares [only] higher speeds to be illegal, and it remains for each driver to decide what speed, within the limit, is appropriate” (p10). Speed lies at the very heart of the road toll in New Zealand, and indeed in every other motorised country in the world. It is a core contributing factor to road crashes and the resulting death and injury toll. Even when speed is not necessarily a contributing factor in a road crash, however, it is a very important factor in determining the severity of the injuries, fatal or otherwise, resulting from the crash. Reductions in the road toll over the last decade in New Zealand and around the motorised world have come from an increasingly scientific approach to road safety. This document is based explicitly on the quantitative research that has developed over the last thirty to forty years on the impact of vehicle speed on the safety of our road transport system. The primary reason for concentrating on quantitative research is to extract the essential elements from the area in such a way that leaves little room for argument that is not based on fact. This is because, unfortunately, we do not appear to adequately understand the nature of the problem, and discussion on speeding gets sidetracked away from the core safety problem. The core safety problem is that we are simply driving too fast on our roads. Without the research information in front of us, we can explain our speeding by referring to the long, flat, straight piece of road that we were driving on. Without the research information, we can explain our speeding by referring to our above-average capacity to detect and respond to hazards. Without the research information, we can explain our speeding by referring to the superior occupant safety features in our car. Without the research information, we can explain our speeding by referring to our need to get from A to B “as soon as possible”. This document has been developed to put our research understanding at the front of our thinking about speeding. With the research information in front of us, we can start to recognise the limitations that New Zealand’s roading network places on how fast we can safely drive. With the research information, we can start to recognise the limitations that our mental and physical functions place on the speed that we drive. We can also start to recognise the incongruity within the road transport system of motor vehicles that can drive twice as fast as the maximum speed limit. While based on scientific principles, therefore, this is not intended is an abstract document. It is intended to provide New Zealanders with the capacity to think again about how fast we drive on our roads, and about what we can do to reduce deaths and injuries on the road associated with speeding. To prompt that rethink, we must first consider speeding as a safety issue, beginning with the basic principles of risk as they apply to speed. Part A of this document outlines the relationship between the speed we drive and the risk of crashing, before discussing the most beneficial means of managing the speed-crash risk. Part A also investigates the risk relationship between the speed we drive and the severity of the injury that will occur in a crash. We then examine the essential elements within the system that impact on our speeding behaviour — vehicles, roads, and people. Part B focuses on design and engineering issues as they relate to vehicles and to roads. Our discussion on vehicle safety reviews improvements in occupant protection, which is relevant in terms of injury severity, and also considers safety benefits from reducing speed through engineering initiatives. This is followed by a discussion on road and traffic design and engineering. Relevant research issues here involve the application of speed limits and, particularly on rural roads, the design speed of the roading network. Some roadway treatments that have been shown to reduce speed are outlined. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting