Documents	Date
Communities at risk register (PDF 13 pages | 129 KB)	August 2011

Guidance

Introduction

The Communities at Risk Register has been developed by the NZTA to identify communities that are over-represented in terms of road safety risk. The register ranks communities by local authority area based on the Safer Journeys areas of concern (see the Safer Journeys Strategy on the Ministry of Transport website for more information).

While the NZTA’s primary investment focus for the Road Safety Promotion Activity Class is on national programmes, targeting the Safer Journeys areas of high concern, it is recognised that some local areas experience a disproportionate risk. By identifying the risk profile for each territorial (TA) area, the NZTA and TAs can target their resources where they are most needed. 

While the Communities at Risk Register highlights risk, other sources of information should also be considered. Individual TAs will then need to determine, through their road safety action planning, how this risk should be addressed, ie by taking into account the four safe systems pillars: safe roads and roadsides, safe users, safe speeds and safe vehicles.

Data source

The Communities at Risk Register is based on fatal and serious injury crash data in the crash analysis system (CAS) database over a five year period, 2006-2010.

The trend in fatal and serious injury numbers is important for calculating data significance. To add relevance to more recent data and take account of recent interventions, the five year average has been adjusted by adding two thirds of a unit of slope.

The calculation of exposure to risk is based on vehicle kilometres travelled (VKT) and, for vulnerable road users, hours of travel. The VKT data is from the Road Assessment and Maintenance Management system (RAMM), and hours of travel is from the MoT ongoing Household Travel Survey.

For the subset young drivers, the local and regional proportion of licensed young drivers from the Drivers Licence Register (DLR) has been used.

For the subset older drivers, the local and regional proportion of populations over 74 years of age using current estimates from Statistics NZ census results has been used.

Heavy motor vehicles (HMVs) have not been included in the register because there is no HMV-specific VKT data available by TA area from which to derive a risk profile.

Methodology

High risk is assigned to communities with risk profiles one standard deviation from the mean, and above.

Medium risk is assigned to communities with risk profiles between half a standard deviation from the mean, and below one standard deviation.