In the past, and as recently as early 2020, the New Zealand media led with a series of stories about the impact of ‘foreign’ drivers and fatal accidents on New Zealand’s roads.  This ‘think piece’ is written to help raise awareness of the continuing need for us to improve our road safety, but to also note that the need for this awareness is often more focused on the ‘us’ and not so often on the ‘them’.  

Following the COVID pandemic, and the New Zealand government deciding to exclude all movement into the country other than by non-citizens / permanent residents on the 19^th March 2020, there has been a 98.6% reduction of visitors to New Zealand.  

This has meant that as a country we have gone from a little over 3.5 million visitors arriving in March 2020, to approximately 50,000 people arriving in New Zealand in March 2021.  Details of the annual visitors is included below from the Stats NZ website. 

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The question though remains, that if this influx of ‘visitors’ to the country was a key aspect of road deaths in New Zealand; then surely we should have seen a dramatic reduction in the number of deaths in line with the reduction in the ‘perilous’ driving attributed to the ‘foreigners’ on our roads?

Some of this may have been borne out by the 2020 statistics which showed an annual reduction (June 2019 to June 2020) of 84 on the previous year (2019); which was 385 road deaths across the whole if New Zealand.  The most noticeable 2020 reductions were in the 50% reductions in Auckland, Taranaki and Wellington; with 20-40% reductions also recorded in the Waikato and Canterbury.  An almost 50% increase in Otago and Nelson/Marlborough though would seem to buck this trend significantly- and as these areas would see a significant number of overseas visitors on an annual basis, would seem to completely dispel the myth that these drivers were the key demographic in the road safety issues we face. 

As 2020 had national and regional lockdowns (Level 4 lockdown 21 March 2020 to 14 May for all of New Zealand; with the Auckland Region additionally locked down twice, in August–September 2020 and February–March 2021) this is more likely the reason for the significant annual reduction to 301 road deaths, rather than the removal of visitors from the roads.

Alarmingly, for 2021, the trend has all been back up for road deaths and regions such as Auckland, Wellington and Otago have all seen cases recorded similar to that in 2019 when the country was fully ‘open for business’.  With the year to date, June 2020 to June 2021 presently recorded at 341; it is likely that the annual statistics for road deaths in 2021 will exceed the pre-covid levels and again illustrates that the effect of the foreigners on our roads my well grab headlines but is not borne in reality.

We need to be better New Zealand!  We need to be more aware, more alert, get off our phones, slow down and never, NEVER, drink and drive!