An article (in The Weekend Sun, April 18, p4) referred to the Ministry of Transport's annual update on the cost of road crashes in New Zealand.

The Ministry estimates the social costs, fatal and injury crashes in 2017, at $4.8 billion, an increase of $0.6 billion on the previous year.

It states that the 378 fatalities in 2017 cost $4.4 million each. Serious injuries are estimated at $458,400 each while a minor injury costs $24,700.

I'd like to know how the ministry comes up with these, seemingly preposterous, figures.
Have they just plucked them from the sky or are they seriously accurate.

If it's the latter I'd love to see the formula (number-crunching) they used to come up with these estimates.

If they can be proven correct then the current Government has absolutely no excuse for canning the bypass road and improvements to Tauranga-Katikati-Waihi Highway.

In April 2016, and again in August 2017, it was estimated that the Tauranga Northern Link would cost $521 million, of which $286 million would be the cost from Tauranga (Cambridge road to Loop Road, TePuna, including a new bridge). Evidently, so far the improvements to the highway between Waihi and Omokoroa have cost $101million.

My point is that if the Ministry of Transport is serious about getting the road toll down then surely the cost to vastly improve this particular highway ($622million total) compares favourably to the $4.8 Billion in fatalities and serious annual road crashes. This Government, with its socialist policies of safety, well-being, etc, etc, is totally hypocritical, to say the least.

P Kelly, Te Puna