West Coast tourism lull should not impact road funding

Nicole Mathewson Reporter from The Press

From local democracy reporter Brendon McMahon:

Fears the West Coast might lose some of its road funding due to tourists disappearing during Covid-19 has been ruled out.

And the question of low fatalities in the region in the past few years due to traffic volumes dropping radically, will not necessarily disadvantage the region, the West Coast Regional Transport Committee has heard.

During a recent meeting, West Coast Regional Council representative Peter Ewen asked if Waka Kotahi (NZTA) kept a database of fatalities for the region.

Regional relationships director James Caygill said the Coast had few fatalities "because the population is low".

Caygill said the Coast stats could easily be skewed.

In 2019, the last full tourist season, there had been 22 serious "severe injury" crashes with the overall total of 25 including three road deaths.

Caygill said the West Coast numbers were relatively low compared with the neighbouring region of Canterbury, which had 365 death and serious injury crashes in 2019.

Another factor was how crash data arrived in the system. For instance the way police entered official data "doesn't take into account near misses".

However, if all crashes were looked at from a health and safety point of view then a near miss was "just as important to capture", Caygill said.

Other factors like the backlog in the coronial process was a factor affecting the statistics.

However site specific crash data was available and the NZTA was working with the police to record crash factors when entering data, including impairment, driver distraction, and speed.

NZTA speed management project team member Mike Creamer said research suggested for every fatality there had been 600 near misses.

"For that reason the way we are talking about the roads now is not whether the crashes are occurring, but where is the risk?"

Those risks included the road shape, traffic volumes, and alignment. Statistics did not tell "the full story" and were only indicative of where a road issue might be.

"There's an awful lot of anecdotal evidence of a lot of crashes on a particular stretch of road," Creamer said.

Caygill said they were "painfully aware" Covid-19 had changed West Coast road crash statistics on particular roads.

"But I'm not sure that we can declare victory because [crash] numbers are going down and therefore pull funding out of the region and take it somewhere else.

"We've still got an underlying risk that we need to manage and if and when tourism returns, in the way it did or some new way."

Doing nothing would see the stats rise again.

"I wouldn't worry that those statistics in the short term are going to lead to a decision to move funding elsewhere. We're interested in the underlying risk."

* Public interest journalism funded through NZ On Air