Black Easter?
What is it with the media’s obsession with the death toll on the road over Easter?
Black Easter claims nine
Black Easter? How is this Easter any more dark than any other?
Thousands have taken to the roads over the weekend. The laws of statistics have reared their ugly head and we have had our usual blip in road fatalities. Each individual accident was by no means random, having someone responsible for careless, or simply stupid, driving. But the overall number is entirely random. Last year we were lucky, the road toll was low. This year we were not (just like in 2008).
This is not a “black” Easter, it is simply an Easter holiday like any other. There was not an increase in crazy people or reckless driving. There was not a decrease in the vigilance of police who were, by all accounts, out in force. There were no more road works than usual. People were no more impatient than they were last year. There were just lots and lots of people on the road and, inevitably, some were not fortunate.
These nine deaths (so far) are no more or less tragic than the other 400 or so that will happen this year. Every death on the road is one too many. But it the price we pay for mobility. Fixating upon our easter road toll is not particularly useful. We need to be focussed upon the things that cause accidents all year road. In particular, we need to deal with our drunk drivers in the harshest way possible – they murder this number of people every fortnight. While we keep dishing out minor sentences for these people, we keep sending the message that we think this is a trivial problem. It is not.
It would also be prudent if we dealt with the dreadful state of our roads. We will have to get over our reluctance to pay reasonable prices for toll roads because the government simply does not have the capital to build them for free use. Or we can continue to pay the price of our substandard roading in blood.
And some people will indeed have a black Easter.
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- SOMETHING TO PONDER! « Presbyterian Research — [...] The Easter road toll has been the centre of discussion in newspapers and across the blog ...
Apr 6 10 8:42 am
It’s a recycled story – you have to come up with something to fill the pages of the broadsheets at the end of the holidays and the Paschal addresses from the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury , Ecumenical patriarch or the Patriarch of Moscow just wont cut it – unless of course they talk about sexual abuse of minors as the Archbishop of Canterbury did.
That Christ rising from the dead thing and its significance is so passe and it is embarrassing that people still hold with such medieval superstition – so by recycled stories of “Easter tragedies serve a good purpose by taking peoples minds off of religion.
It also helps the rulers giving them the opportunity to make new laws which help fill the coffers when the peasants, believers or otherwise break them.
.-= Andrei´s last blog ..? =-.
Apr 6 10 11:30 am
I’d say the qualifies as classic “spam journalism”.
Spam Journalism: The spurious use of sensational headlines to add spice to an otherwise pointless article.
.-= Bill Bennett´s last blog ..Five reasons why I won’t be buying an iPad soon =-.
Apr 6 10 10:03 pm
Yes, you are right, Bill. And it goes some way to show how tired I was last night that I didn’t realise it!
Apr 6 10 3:57 pm
The Government has plenty of capital to spend on improving our roads, just that it chooses to spend it instead on TVNZ, Radio NZ, WFF, salaries of government employees and buying and subsidising train sets, for a few examples.
Apr 6 10 10:05 pm
Of course, the government that stopped spending money on these things would be out of office long before the roads were completed…
Apr 7 10 4:41 pm
Perhaps; but this is exactly what the politicians would have us accept without thought. There is enough money to spend on decent roads and infrastructure, but governments choose not to spend money on these things, and instead prioritise welfare transfers. It is aiding the status quo to accept these things without critical thinking – you are doing the left’s job for them.
Apr 7 10 2:45 pm
What magnified the ridiculous commentary you describe further was the line the media were running, that no one died after Sunday because people final took notice of the police message to drive patiently.
Apr 7 10 9:10 pm
The government now spends all of the taxes it takes for road use and vehicle ownership on transport, and 85% of that on roads. It is engaging in the biggest road building programme in 50 years, to the extent it is spending money on poor quality projects. However, if roads were run commercially, with debt financing, funded through future revenue from road users, there could be a more astute and consumer focused approach to road management. Nobody should be under illusions that roads aren’t being adequately financed though, the only real limit at the moment is the planning process. Take the state highway strategy for SH1 through Wellington, it now includes projects cancelled over 30 years ago that have had nothing done on them since. Part of the inertia in road building is simply that – for example, no serious work on a second Mt Victoria Tunnel has been done since the 1970s. Now NZTA is starting almost from scratch on these sorts of projects
.-= Libertyscott´s last blog ..Greens continue to oppose economics and individual freedom on transport =-.