When discussing the road toll, southern region coroner David Crerar strongly dislikes the term "road accident".
He takes issue with the word "accident" because it implies that any subsequent death has resulted from pure chance, rather than the reality that most road crashes have more specific causes, including human error, or mechanical fault, he says.
Very few crashes were of the "pure"accident kind, he said.
Often, there was a cascade of relatively small factors which individually would not result in "fatal consequences".
A key motivation in carrying out his job was fulfilling the coroner's statutory duty to identify key safety hazards and to alert the community to them, with a view to preventing future deaths, Mr Crerar said.
"I'm driven by the number of preventable deaths," he says.
Since Mr Crerar took up the newly-restructured post of southern region coroner on July 1 last year - with responsibility for coronial services for all Otago-Southland - he has held hearings in Queenstown and Invercargill.
Last week, he presided at his first coronial hearings in Dunedin.
Under the new coronial system, ushered in by the Coroners Act 2006, 14 full-time coroners are replacing the country's previous 55 part-time coroners.
Mr Crerar and a case manager are replacing Otago-Southland's five coroners, although some deaths which occurred before July 1 last year are still being dealt with by his part-time colleagues.
He works closely with families and is well aware of the damaging wider effect of car crash fatalities, whether they involve the occupants of cars or pedestrians.
"It's not just the children or the parents of the deceased."
Motorists who were not at fault, but who were, nevertheless, involved in fatal accidents were often"dreadfully affected", he said.
"These people are entitled to be told by me that they're not to blame."
A former national Coroners Council secretary, Mr Crerar is one of the country's most experienced coroners, having been in the role for about 28 years, much of that based in Rangiora, as North Canterbury coroner.
Although he was the only coroner in Otago-Southland under the new system, taking leave had not been a problem, with coroners from other areas already enabling him to take two fairly short breaks, he said.
He believed coroners had contributed to the overall drop in road-related deaths in recent years.
"I'd like to think that over the years we've made a difference".
