Wake up Bay of Plenty Regional Council - your Land Transport Plan is flawed.
With some difficulty I managed to locate a copy of the draft Regional Land Transport plan 2015-2045.

As to be expected, the difficulty for a reader is the plan is high level strategic and provides scant operational detail to one of my passions - road safety.

Our region - just next to the Waikato - continues to retain second place nationally for the number of fatal deaths on our roads and this has been the case for a number of years.

According to NZ child youth Mortality Review committee's 10th annual report, the number of young people dying in unintentional accidents is 1.6 times greater in the BOP than the national average; the majority of these deaths are from car crashes.

The BOP is predominately a rural district with large kilometres traveled on lower-grade roads.

KiwiRAP report 51 per cent of our roads are only two-star rated and a further 35 per cent are three-star.

Also, our vehicle fleet is much older than average. Crashes are generally caused by driver error, poor vehicles, speed alcohol and drugs.

You'd expect to find in our Regional Transport Plan a robust programme focusing on road safety education.

Our regional council, however, continues to undervalue and under-resource the road safety space, in particular with personnel-taking responsibility.

My experience in attempting to locate a copy of the draft plan made me realise they don't have a road safety go-to person; someone who can tell me what they are actually doing out there.

I can only assume the plan - if there is one - is to continue to churn out the same old billboard and radio messages, and to continue to make little difference - and continue to provide only scant funding from the regional council budget.

Token gestures are no longer good enough; there is a better and proven way to manage this vital work.

Time for change, there are much better regional road safety delivery models than those operating across the BOP and council is informed to respect to these, yet you continue to ignore the opportunity to do better.

What can the reader assume from that?

Michael O'Neill, Mount Maunganui.

BOPRC transport policy manager Garry Maloney responds:

The regional council does not have a statutory mandate to focus on road safety in the same way that it has a mandate to prepare a Regional Land Transport Plan.

That is not to say the matter is not important. Each year the council prepares a Road Safety Action Plan, which outlines what it plans to deliver in the area of road safety by working with its road safety partners.

A copy of the plan can be downloaded from www.boprc.govt.nz/landtransportstrategy
However, council has limited resources and in developing its Long Term Plan has sought the community's direction on where it should focus its efforts during the next 10 years.

That process would have been the mechanism for the correspondent to engage with council to bring about the change they are seeking.