At Parliament, Mr Joyce released the Safer Journeys Action plan as part of New Zealand’s response to the United Nations Decade of Action for Road Safety launch.
The global initiative aims to reduce the number of people killed on roads – nearly 1.3 million every year. Children and young people make a disproportionately high number of those killed and seriously injured worldwide.
Mr Joyce said that while significant progress has been made in recent years to reduce New Zealand’s road toll, last year’s death toll of 375 was still far too high and significantly higher relative to population size than other developed countries such as Australia and the UK.
In New Zealand, the Safer Journeys Action Plan provides a roadmap of what we are doing in 2011-12 to implement the Safer Journeys road safety strategy – a strategy launched last year to seriously reduce death and trauma on New Zealand roads over the next ten years.
Along with our partners, the Police, ACC, Ministry of Transport and Local Government New Zealand, we at the NZ Transport Agency are embedding the Safe System approach to road safety into our road safety activites. This means we are working towards a road transport system that is more accommodating of human error, and that can manage the forces that injure people in a crash to reduce serious injury and minimise the consequences of unsafe behaviour.
A Safe System is all about ensuring that we all take responsibility for road safety. That means road builders, the vehicle industry, local government and central government as well as road users.
To achieve a significantly reduced road toll it is critical that all agencies involved in our road system work in partnership to achieve a Safe System.
NZTA’s actions outlined over the next two years include targeting high-risk rural roads and high-risk urban intersections, and progressing Safe System demonstration projects. We will continue to focus on improving the safety of young drivers, for example by raising awareness of their level of crash risk and implementing a more difficult restricted driver’s licence test.
Technology will play an important role in achieving safer speeds, and we will continue to promote safer vehicles.
There will also be a significant focus on action to reduce death and serious injury to high risk groups such as motorists and motorcyclists.
The Safer Journeys action plan is available at www.saferjourneys.govt.nz
For more information on the Decade of Action for Road Safety go to the Decade of Action website
