Opinion: Are extreme public-service messages just training us to be cynical ?

The Easter weekend generated a grisly toll of fatalities on our roads - 11 deaths, the highest number for an Easter weekend since 1993. From the MSM coverage of these crashes and personal tragedies, you would naturally take-away that our roads are unsafe, and becoming unsafer. But that is just not the case. We have been tracking the official stats on the road toll with data since 1996 - in that year 514 perople died. But in the twelve months to March 31, 2010, the death toll is down to below 380. And we are driving more cars, and doing more kms than ever before. So, with apologies to Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner who did some revealing analysis for the traffic fatality rate in the US in their Superfreakonomics book, here is the equivalent information for New Zealand: the average driver will need to drive continuously for 253 years before being involved in a fatal car accident. Yes, you read it right - 253 years of non-stop driving. According to the latest NZTA data (for 2008) there are almost 2.4 million cars, rentals, taxis and motorcycles on our roads. And according to the latest data for distances travelled from the MofE (2007), we travel 40.2 billion kms per year, or 17,050 kms per vehicle per year. At the current rate of road deaths, that is more than 110 million kms per death. If you travelled at 50 kms per hour, you would take 253 years of continuous driving to rack up those 110 million kms. No doubt there is a valid public service cautionary tale that needs to be told about driving safely - but by any measure, you are very, very safe on our roads. No, you can't justify any road death, and most of those that happen are entirely avoidable. But over-egging the nature of the risk, over-selling the dangers will eventually get found out and build distrust in the validity in the safe-driving message. In fact TV One ran a story comparing our 11 deaths with Australia's 13 over the same weekend. What they didn't say was that the annual death rate in Australia is more than 1,600 and now starting to rise, compared with our 380 and still falling, and that is only fractionally worse for NZ on a per capita basis. Lets face it, there are way more risky things you do every day of your life than driving on our roads.