Horror on the highways

When speeding kills more New Zealanders each year than homicide, there's dismay over the new government trading speed reductions for perceived economic benefits.

- GREG DIXON

The only thing I remember is the bright lights as they came towards me. It was after 10 on a wet, good-for-nothing night in the winter of 1989, and I was driving home from my part-time job in Auckland's St Heliers when I rounded a curve in the road, saw the lights right in front me and...

When I regained consciousness I couldn't see for the blood in my eyes. Or quite think where I was. But a voice I didn't know was talking to me. Who should they call, it asked? Could I give them a number? I managed my girlfriend's and my parents' and...

When I came to again, I was in an ambulance, its siren blaring my bad news. I still could not see; there was pain; I was panicking. "What's happening," I asked the paramedics, "what's happening?" I had been in a car accident. I was on my way to Auckland Hospital. I would be okay.

But I was not okay, and it had been no accident. I had been hit head-on by a drunk driver. He had crossed the centre line. I'd been keeping my speed down in the rain; he had not. My car was a write-off, and so, for many months after, was my face.

Glass had ripped open the flesh on my cheek and forehead, leaving slivers embedded around my right eye. I had been lucky not to lose it, the plastic surgeon told me, but the injuries left me with angry, red scars around my right eye and nose and surgical metal in my face.

So I was not okay, though in the most important way, I was. Although I was among the nearly 16,000 people injured and maimed on our roads in 1989, I had not joined the dead. And there were many. By the time the year was done, 755 people had been killed on the roads - two people every day-making it one of the worst years in our history. In 1989, we lost around 22 people out everyone 100,000 on our roads, making them little better than killing fields.

Dishearteningly, 35 years after my accident they largely still are, with around seven out of every 100,000 dying on the roads.