Source: Radio New Zealand
The Ministry of Transport currently factors elements such as road closures, emergency service response, and the social costs for the life lost into the total cost of a road fatality. RNZ
A transport consultancy firm says analysis of traffic data reveals the total cost of a crash is up to 70 percent higher that previously calculated.
The Ministry of Transport currently calculates the social cost of a road fatality at more than $15 million, which includes elements such as the road closure, emergency service response, and the social costs for the life lost.
But Abley Principal Transportation Planner Chris Blackmore told Nine to Noon data analysis shows that the impact of a crash on the overall road network is not factored into that calculation.
“There’s a lot of big immediate costs that we see when you look at the impacts of road trauma – be that FENZ, hospital admission, recovery costs.
“We do occasionally take into account any easily visible impacts of closing a road … but at the moment that’s only really included at a high level, and it ignores a lot of the secondary and following impacts.”
Councils and the Transport Agency had traditionally relied on physical equipment such as pneumatic road tubes to measure traffic data.
“That’s really what has prevented, up until now, having a more holistic view of the impacts of what we call network disruption.”
But a system called TomTom Area Speed enabled the analysis of more information, and more sophisticated data about the wider impacts crashes had, Blackmore said.
TomTom takes information from sources such as Apple, data from the cars themselves, and other apps motorists might be using to show exactly how widespread the congestion is, for how long, and what activities might be affected.
Blackmore provided the example of a crash between a bus and a car on Auckland’s Tamaki Drive, which closed the significant connection between the eastern bays and the city centre for more than 24 hours.
“What we could see with TomTom was that as that link closed, people had to find their way around.
“Say five O’clock, six O’clock in the morning, that’s all right … but what happens when you get into the peak hour … we see all of the other connections from the eastern bays massively overloaded.
The TomTom data showed exactly how people reacted to road closures, he said.
“Some people do u-turns, some people turn of earlier and try and get through some back roads, some people try to tough it out in the queue.”
When the data was added up, it revealed the overall impact the crash had on travel times, and the total disruption to the road network.
Crashes on rural roads also could carry a heavy unseen cost, Blackmore said, using the example of a crash on State Highway 6 near Kington in Otago.
“What we saw there was that travel time increases weren’t as significant because there’s not a heap of congestion. People could figure out that there’s a crash before they started driving down State Highway 6 and make their choices.
“But we did see hundreds of thousands of extra kilometres that people had to travel, and that has impacts on people’s lives and their routines as well.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
