Sunday nights are usually the same in my household; something nice for dinner, chilling out with my flatmate, and the compulsory viewing of One News Live at 6. The news was the same as usual last Sunday, with some World Cup updates, something about the United States, and a report on the death toll on our New Zealand roads over Matariki weekend. We lost two people to road accidents over this weekend, bringing the total to 175 this year. At the time of writing, that’s almost one person per day that dies on our roads, and it raises the question of why exactly we have such a road fatality problem. Norway and Finland, other first world countries with similar populations averaged 111 and 181 road traffic deaths in 2025, whilst New Zealand had 272. The road structures in these countries are also similar, and they also have the added risk of extreme cold weather that results in icy roads and dangerous conditions, but somehow they maintain a lower average. This is down to a number of reasons, and each of these prove how the system could be improved to both benefit and keep our society safer.
The first stark contrast between these European countries and New Zealand is the vast and efficient public transport systems they have in place. 10% of Norway’s population relies entirely on public transport to get around, whilst Finland has 37% of their people travel on their public transport systems. This is one major factor in reducing road deaths- less people on the roads means less casualties. The amount of registered vehicles in New Zealand is almost equivalent to that of both of these European countries as well, with Finland and Norway averaging about 6 million vehicles total, whilst New Zealand has almost 6 million alone. The culture around car ownership versus public transport in New Zealand is also a major player in why we have so many on our roads. Having a licence and a first car is a rite of passage, and a milestone moment in many people’s lives, while it is not as significant to people in Nordic countries.
This mass of car ownership in New Zealand results in a huge amount of money for the government, as Road User Charges (RUCs), registration costs, and fuel tax contribute about 5.5 billion dollars to our economy. Almost three times this is spent every year, but somehow our roads are still unsafe to travel on. The long, narrow rural roads without a center median barrier and narrow shoulders make long-distance travel inherently dangerous, and these are features that European countries include specifically to ensure their roads are safer in the long term. The economics of this is a difficult thing to face, as we already spend a lot of money on our roads each year, but still manage to have an extremely high mortality rate, as there are simply too many roads to maintain and keep at an average level, rather than make much safer. The initial investment to create the same standard of road as the aforementioned Nordic countries would be extreme, but the cost it would cut down with regards to emergency service response and human life would be much more valuable.
Taking this responsibility to make sure the area people are travelling is safer is evidently more effective than placing the blame on the drivers themselves. New Zealand’s road PSA campaigns are centred around taking responsibility for your own actions- not speeding, not drinking after driving, and making safe driving decisions. These other countries with lower fatality rates ask themselves questions regarding driver safety, like; What if someone does choose to speed? What if someone does make a dangerous driving decision? These considerations allow the engineering of the roads to cater to every possibility, and provide safer options for if something does happen. On longer rural roads, the larger shoulders allow plenty of room for quick safety manoeuvers, and the larger road centres leave less risk for accidental collisions. New Zealand’s attitudes regarding road fatalities also need changing. Mindlessly scrolling through news pages usually comes with headlines about people dying in horrific accidents while no one bats an eye, yet when aviation accidents occur anywhere in the world it would be huge news. To quash people making poor decisions regarding their driving, and encouraging them to think about what they’re doing before they do it, we need to treat death on our roads with the same significance that we do in our skies or seas.
All of this is OK to be said, but it is much harder to see it actually done. To see New Zealand’s fatality rates on the road drop, we need to reduce spending in PSAs that blame drivers for the harm, and instead focus on campaigning for change on the system that is supposed to support our safety. An overhaul on our road structure may be expensive, and take a long time, but meaningful change can be made by changing smaller things over time that will add up to more significant change. By looking at countries like Norway and Finland as the models for our road safety, and taking our road deaths more seriously whilst looking for areas to actively improve in, our Sunday nights may not be spoiled by news of casualties on our roads quite as often.
