Road to Zero will never work. Here’s why.

1 Mar

Perfection is unattainable. We cannot eliminate human error, complacency, mechanical failure, and outside influences.

I recently lost a good friend in a car accident. I don’t know exactly what happened, except there was a collision involving a truck. My friend, Marianne Mckenzie, owned a media company and was actively involved in the advertising industry. We’d spoken about Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Association’s (NZTA) advertising on many occasions. But she’s gone now to join the other 379 who died on New Zealand’s roads in 2022.

Is the NZTA’s advertising working?

No. With an advertising budget of fourteen million dollars, you have to ask why. The messaging is fractured and confusing, and worst of all, it’s now focusing more on using scare tactics to get its message across. Have a look at the NZTA’s current campaigns running on their marketing campaign page and you can see what they’re doing. My opinion is that of the 14 campaigns displayed, only three do not use scare tactics.

And now other companies are taking matters into their own hands. The HW Richardson Group has just launched a driver safety campaign called Almost Dead. Their Almost Dead campaign uses real-life dashcam footage, collected from its fleet of over 1,300 trucks to show how reckless drivers are on the roads. It’s a fascinating view of how bad drivers can be. Kudos to HWR for taking the wheel here.

Is the NZTA’s advertising agency, BBDO Clemenger, responsible for the higher death tolls?

Yes – 2022 was the worst year for road deaths since 2017, and the worst for deaths over the Festive Season since 2018. The road death toll is up 18% since 2017. Proof of BBDO’s failure to convert. Advertising is all about results but Clemenger BBDO likely has other goals: advertising awards.

In 2014, Clemenger BBDO won 38 global and local advertising awards. In 2014, 293 people died on our roads. Effectively, Clemenger BBDO won just over one advertising award for every seven people who died.

Was Clemenger BBDO’s 2014 advertising campaign for the NZTA effective? Based on the death toll in 2014, no, it wasn’t. And they haven’t created an effective, results-driven campaign since then and the numbers in 2022 prove it.

Lowering our death toll isn’t all about creativity, nor does it necessarily require it. Clemenger BBDO is in a very privileged position to work with the NZTA. I know lowering the death toll is a difficult task, but Clemenger BBDO has immense resources, global partners, and colossal manpower. We must demand more from them.

Going back to my friend Marianne’s death, anything could have happened. I believe she was a good driver – I drove with her on many occasions from Auckland to Hamilton, and she showed no signs of bad driving habits. So, was she distracted when she died? Was the other party driving sensibly? Who knows.

What can we, as road users, do?

Driving better is the obvious, clichéd answer. But that’s far too simple to work. We should already be driving better, and the NZTA should be making progress in dropping the death toll, but neither of us is succeeding.

Should we be asking the NZTA to produce advertising about car maintenance? Should they lower the WOF requirements back to six months? Can they get off their butts and do something about the state of the roads? Should we ask that the NZTA move all advertising in-house and remove the advertising awards influence, or even go as far as saying that all advertising done for the NZTA can’t be entered in awards? There are many possibilities, but it’s unlikely we’ll get a solution acceptable to every road user.

It’s Thursday night as I type this, and I can hear two cars racing on Te Irirangi Drive, about one kilometre away, where the speed limit is 60km/h. I’m sure one of them has a V-Tech engine. I don’t think any of the drivers care.

My next-door neighbour owns a car tuning company called Eastern Automotive. One of the engine upgrades they can do to a Holden is the Walkinshaw Package, where they can take the car’s power output up to 547KW. And just down the road, another neighbour earns extra income by tuning BMWs to increase their power output. Speed kills, but it makes lots of money too. And as long as there are people actively chasing speed, the roads will not get any safer.

Writing this blog has just made me even more sceptical about Road to Zero, and I’d like to think there’s more optimist in me than cynic but there isn’t about this topic.