Police hail zero road toll for Easter

In a record breaking holiday weekend, no one has died on the country's roads.

Five people were killed on the roads last Easter and the previous record sat at three fatalities, which was recorded in 1998, 2002 and 2003.

The official holiday period began at 4pm of Thursday and ended at 6am today.

As at 6 o'clock this morning police had received no reports of fatalities on the roads.

Police attended 519 crashes over the long weekend, compared with 590 over the Easter weekend last year.

But the number of other traffic incidents was up over the weekend, including reports of illegal racing and fleeing drivers, Mr Morgan said.

It was really difficult to put the zero road toll down to any particular reason.

"It's a funny thing, the weekend before Easter it was really bad, we had nine deaths in a really short period of time, but since the Monday of the 2nd [of April] we've had none, right through to now, so it's not just Easter, it's been a long stint fatality-free,'' Mr Morgan said.

A lower speed tolerance of 4kph was in effect over the holiday weekend. It was introduced on Queen's Birthday Weekend in 2010 following a really bad Easter in which 12 people died.

"[But] it's not the silver bullet. We've brought it in, and on the weekends we've run it compared to the weekends that its not, we see less crashes, but in saying that we had a really bad Christmas holiday break with 18 fatalities over that time and we had the [4kph] tolerance in then.''

The number of deaths on the roads was generally trending down, Mr Morgan said.

"With statistics like this, it's really hard to look at them in small time frames, they really need to be looked at over a period of time and to look at trend lines and things like that.

"We are [up] and we have been for quite some time, if you look back into the 70s we were killing people at huge rates, our yearly fatality rates were 800-900 ... now we're talking 300.''

This year's tragedy-free Easter comes after last year saw the lowest annual road toll since 1952.

However, more people have died on the country's roads so far this year, compared with the same time last year.

Eighty-six people have died on the roads this year, while 77 died last year.

 

Add a Comment