DEATH ON THE ROADS

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 253, 22 July 1936, Page 8

DEATH ON THE ROADS

Road-accident figures quoted by the Minister of Transport in moving the second reading of the Motor Vehicles Amendment Bill in the House of Representatives early last month more than justified his adjective “staggering.” In the past seven years, said Mr. Semple, twelve hundred and fifty people had been killed and thirty-five thousand injured. Road casualties over the past thirteen years were greater than the total number of casualties in the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in the Great War. On the law of averages, in every family of four children one was destined to be killed or injured on the road. . . . This method of presenting statistics is extraordinarily effective, and the Minister was widely congratulated at the time upon his success in disturbing the complacency of the New Zealand road-using public. “I hope that every member of the House,” he said, “is just as keen as I am to stop this unwarranted slaughter of human life.” And the second reading debate, as far as it went, fulfilled that hope. The debate is to be continued to-day. But events in the meantime have thrown Mr. Semple’s terrible figures of six weeks ago right out of date. Since the Bill was introduced _on June 6, there have been, according to his statement yesterday —which any newspaper reader who wishes may check —forty-seven further deaths on our roads. At this rate we shall lose in the next seven years not twelve hundred and fifty killed, but more than two thousand five hundred; not thirty-five thousand injured, but seventy-five thousand. Moreover, this estimate is based upon the accident figures for six weeks in the middle of winter; what a terrible prospect the summer holds, when there will be two or three times as many vehicles on the road. Mr. Semple suggests that ninety per cent, of recent deaths were preventible. That means that we are killing our fellow-citizens at the rate of three hundred and fifty a year by carelessness and criminal negligence. The Minister proposes calling a national conference to plan a “safety-first” campaign. What he has in mind, no doubt, is a conference of automobile associations, local bodies, insurance companies and any other specially interested organisations—although for that matter every man, woman and child in the country is vitally interested. No doubt he will find assistance 'from such a gathering, and he deserves every encouragement to go ahead with his plan. Nevertheless there is already at his hand a much more representative assembly—Parliament itself. If it be within the capacity of our people to devise a plan whereby this terrible blot on our civilisation can be lightened, Parliament ought surely to be able to give a lead. It is to be hoped that members who have not yet spoken on the second reading debate will, upon its resumption to-day, devote themselves seriously to an analysis of the casualty figures and to the search for methods of reducing them.