Greg Murphy – From tragedy comes hope

It’s sad that another tragedy had to occur for our Street Smart driver training programme to kick back into life.

A couple of months ago, a young driver, Kelan Stroud of Cromwell, died in a car accident shortly after passing his restricted licence test.

This hit the local community hard, but it also helped reignite our driver education programme that had run short on funding.

The Tony Quinn Foundation generously stepped in with a grant that will see us deliver this life-saving programme for the next three years.

This is great news but I have to ask, why is the private sector having to front up with the money for this programme?

The local Cromwell community has also got in behind it. The attendees of the first two days of our new course are now fully funded thanks to the kindness of private individuals via a Givealittle campaign.

But it’s infuriating that this is the way we have to go about things. We’re grateful to be back and have locked in as many days as we can at Hampton Downs, Taupo and Highlands.

We want to take the Street Smart programme to as many venues as we can around the country. But there are many regions we can’t reach due to a lack of facilities.

Our course is hands-on – it’s not about sitting in a classroom – and we need space to run it. We also need the public to see that such facilities are something worthy of investing in.

The Quinn Foundation has put up $250,000 a year for the next three years which, in the grand scheme of things, is not a large sum considering the amount of money wasted over the years.

Billions of dollars have been given to contractors and wasted on ineffective advertising. Just think about the number of kids we could have helped with just a fraction of that money.

We just need a small percentage of the overall road safety budget to deliver something that genuinely works.

We can do everything over the course of a day on the short circuit at Hampton Downs. But such facilities just don’t exist in the regions. I reckon it wouldn’t be difficult to put things in place.

Central and local government could provide this around the country if there was the will. The money that is wasted on cycle ways and traffic control could be diverted to making space available around the country.

Then we and other programme providers would have a place to teach kids survival skills for the road and we could save more lives.

The private sector has come up with the funding for the training and now it’s up to the public sector to provide the facilities to expand.

The scope for these is enormous. They would be multi-use facilities available for fleet training, bus and truck driver training, and all kinds of automotive stuff.

Our Street Smart programme is simple but effective, and could have a far greater reach.

Yet it seems those in power fail to understand the benefits, or even show any interest which is so frustrating.

How many more young people have to die for us to get some real progress?

This story first appeared in the July issue of NZ Autocar magazine.