New Zealand Police assistant commissioner of road policing Dave Cliff talks about the importance speed plays in how serious a crash can be.

Thank-you to all staff for your work on our roads over the recent holiday period. I'm aware of the efforts made by staff to be visible and proactive and the figure of 17 lives lost does not reflect any lack of focus by Police.

We only have to look back a few years to see how much worse it could have been.

The speed a vehicle is travelling is a major factor in the harm caused in any crash.

Most drivers accept extreme speeding is dangerous. However many think they can speed a little – safely – because they are a good, alert driver. However, most of the people involved in the 103,713 injury crashes in the ten years up to 2013 probably thought the same.

Let's look at what science and research tell us. Put simply, when speeds fall, road trauma falls. Current advice from the European Traffic Safety Council is that if speeds were to fall just 1kmh across all European Union roads, more than 2,200 deaths could be prevented each year.

All studies say essentially the same thing. A five percent decrease in average speed leads to approximately a ten percent decrease in all injury crashes and a 20 percent decrease in fatal crashes.

The human body is not designed to tolerate impact speeds much above 30kmh. An impact speed of 30kmh will result in only five percent of pedestrians being killed, but by 50km/h, 55 percent will be killed. At 60kmh, 85 percent of pedestrians will be killed. Those who are not killed will often be left with serious injuries.

The evidence is clear that higher average traffic speeds mean more road death and injury.

This is why Police and our road safety partners will continue to focus on speed as well as other key road safety issues.

This is based on 30 years of sound research, not the terrible outcome of a two-week holiday period.

It is also based on clear evidence that we are heading in the right direction, with the toll declining significantly since the bad old days when 830 people were killed in one year.

While the provisional December-January death toll was, at 51, the second lowest since 1965, even one death is too many. We can reduce it further – and increasing safety for everyone by reducing average speeds is one of the ways we will do it.

Speeding matters, even at a low level. Our enforcement of all speeding also matters.

Article courtesy of Ten One Magazine.