The Press FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 1954. Road Safety

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27308, 26 March 1954, Page 10

The Press FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 1954. Road Safety

> The Minister of Transport (Mr j Goosman) has urged the New } Zealand Road Safety Council to redouble its efforts to reduce the ' shocking toll of dead and maimed J from road accidents. It is to be 4 hoped that the Government, which J has shown a much greater inclina--1 tion to talk about the problem than J to attack it vigorously—especially . when the attack means spending l more money—will act no less ■ energetically in putting the Road i Safety Council’s recommendations into effect. It must start, obviously, : with the council’s recommendation i this week that there should be a ' “ special increase ” in the staff of the Transport Department to permit more thorough patrolling of the roads. Individual members of the ’ council have urged this step for a ’ long time; the council as a whole has been dissuaded from espousing . it only because of the eloquent pleas of successive Commissioners of ( Transport, who have argued, against the evidence of statistics and the dictates of common sense, that the road safety laws could be enforced adequately by modifying the patrolling system—in ways that had the great advantage of saving departmental petrol—and by increasing the percentage of prosecutions to offences reported. The present commissioner (Mr H. B. Smith) was still determined at this week’s meeting of the Safety Council to put the best possible face on his department’s enforcement policy. He said that between 1948 and 1953 the number of traffic officers on the roads had increased from 117 to 176. He also gave some comparative figures for offence notices issued and prosecutions laid; and these, he said, added up to “ a “ remarkable increase in enforce- “ ment activity.” If it is an increase, it is by no means remarkable. The increase in patrol staff over five years has been 59, or a tiny fraction over 50 per cent. In the same period the number of licensed vehicles has increased from 357,662 to 513,651, or slightly more than 43 per cent.; and it is obvious enough that traffic hazards increase by far more than arithmetical proportion as the density of traffic increases. But this tells only a small part of the story. In the period reviewed by the commissioner the Transport Department -has taken on new and heavy responsibilities by entering into agreements with nine additional local bodies to control traffic in their areas. These include such populous and busy cities . and boroughs as Hamilton, Masterton, New Plymouth, Gisborne, Hastings, and Teuranga. It is not too much to say that the greater number of the additional 59 inspectors taken on to the department’s strength in the period could be fully employed in policing the traffic in these additional areas controlled by the department. Over the country as a whole it has been a story of inade- . quate enforcement resources more and more thinly spread. It is impossible to sympathise with the commissioner’s complacent view of his department’s enforcement efforts; and it is to be hoped that his remarks to the Safety Council do not foreshadow the continued stubborn resistance of the department to the growing demand for more effective enforcement of the traffic laws. It is equally impossible to discern the causes of Mr Goosman’s satisfaction with the work of the new plain-clothes traffic staff—which has been established at the cost of further depleting the enforcement staff. All the evidence so far—and it is mainly departmental evidence—is that the plain-clothes inspectors are detecting hour after hour and day after day serious offences of the kind that cause accidents and lead to death and injury. The department acknowledges that most of 'these offences would not be committed if

a uniformed officer were in sight. They must, therefore, be mainly deliberate and calculated breaches of the law. The department professed at one time to believe that most of these offences were unpremeditated, often almost unconscious; and that a good talking-to by an inspector would cause the offender permanently to mend his .ways. Mr Goosman has at least dropped that pretence. He now finds the chief value of the mufti patrols to lie in their deterrent effect: no motorist can be sure that the car following him does not contain an inspector, and so he will not risk (deliberately) breaking the law. “This “shows the psychological value of “ having these plain-clothes men,” the Minister told the Road Safety Council. Would not the psychological value of the plain-clothes men, and their power to deter roadusers from breaking the law and risking their lives and the lives of others, be much greater if the plainclothes men had their proper and entirely appropriate power to prosecute gross offenders ? A great deal of synthetic indignation and moral righteousness has been worked up to oppose the idea that potential murderers and maimers on the roads should be fought by the same means which the community uses against ordinary criminals. As the “ Manchester Guardian ” remarked recently, “ nobody wants motorists. “to be persecuted, but thoughtless “ and selfish driving should be “ punished as the serious offence “it is. Too often the sympathy of “ the law seems to lie with the “ killers on the roads; public opinion “should insist on turning it towards “ their victims.” It is time the Minister and, his department, the Road Safety Council, ant} the automobile associations showed where their sympathy lies—and some sense of the urgency and reality of the problem facing them.