Another SLG, soon after being elevated clearly way beyond her abilities and probably influenced by the euphoria of having her dreams coming true, made an awesome revelation of her disconnect in stating she would get the road toll down to zero.

Now ask any one involved in frontline traffic management and law enforcement: they will all accept that the nature of the beast  and its habitat ensures such nonsense will never come to pass. Remove all vehicular traffic from all carriageways and there would still be deaths among  pedestrians.

This morning Newstalk ZB news bulletins are debating whether the holiday weekend road toll is 1 or 2 after one of those deaths resulted from a Police Chase – note not a ‘fleeing from the law‘ crash – and if that death is going to be included.

Since many of the road deaths result to a large extent from “driver error“, hence the moving of the language away from accidents, there are possibly as many ways to prune the horrible statistics as there are deaths. Debating if a police attempt at law enforcement should have the fleeing driver somehow not a “road death” beggars understanding, although it fits with other statistical manipulations and down-grading of measurements of government performance by removing targets and other aspirational promise markers.

To debate whether including a fleeing-from-the-law-criminal act, ending in death during the Holiday period – leaving a plethora of opportunity to greatly reduce a toll that is rising largely in sync with vehicle movement figures, but at odds with the current  pulling back from infrastructure building for vehicular traffic in favour of 19th century rail technology – is spin at PhD level.