Queen’s Birthday weekend saw the family bundled into the Landcruiser and off on a much anticipated road trip.  It’d been organised for months.  Two families sharing a lovely holiday home right on the edge of Lake Rotoiti.

Thoughts of Rotoiti on an early Winter’s day.   A beautiful calmness, with Black Swans dipping the tips of their wings in the lake upon take off, the daily ritual boat trip to the Hot Pools and coffee at Okere Falls.   This time of year is too cold for water skiing but perhaps there’d be time for a troll for a big Rainbow Trout.

But before all that you have to get there and with these images we set off late Friday afternoon.  We’d heard the Police warnings that if you got caught exceeding the speed limit by more than four k’s you would get a ticket. This is where your car’s cruise control comes into its own.  If you have one, learn to use it.  It’ll save you money.

I have a theory about cruise control.   When you engage it, it seems to calm you.  You suddenly don’t feel obliged to keep up with anybody else.  It’s a psychological shift.  Your brain senses that the pressure is off to compete with the guy in front or the tailgater behind.  And you don’t get that instant guilty feeling when you see a Police car in the rear view mirror, because you know you are obeying rules of the road and it actually feels good.

So last Friday I set my cruise control slightly above the speed limit and steer the car off down the highway.  And I didn’t feel alone.   I felt part of a movement for change on the roads.    Okay I’m over dramatizing but this weekend on the road the journey did feel different.   Less frenetic, a more even flow to the traffic movements.

It seemed like every car had cruise control engaged and every driver was sitting just above 100 ks and the traffic was flowing along just nicely thank you.  I saw plenty of cop cars, but I didn’t see one example of the familiar impatient idiot with ther death wish overtaking on a blind corner.

Sadly the weather was rubbish so the Rotoiti dreams weren’t quite realized.   Although a hot pool visit in the rain is special.  So came the return journey.  Queen’s Birthday Monday - normally a traffic horror show.  But not this time!   It was very easy, not too many hold ups or tailbacks even though we were travelling in the late afternoon.

Then to wake up Tuesday morning and read that there was just one death on the roads this weekend and that it was the lowest toll in 54 years made the world feel a better place.  Of course to say that we’ve solved our traffic woes in one hit would be far too presumptious.  But perhaps we as a nation are finally waking up to the fact that speed does kill, and that the Police ‘no tolerance’ to speeding edict works.

Then again it could that the weather was a shocker and a lot of people just hunkered down at home, which in turn kept a lot of people off the roads. Last year 10 people were killed in the Queen's Birthday holiday period.  This year just one.  The last time we had just one death was back when we were driving Vauxhalls, Morris Oxfords or FJ Holdens in 1956.

That was the first year records were kept of holiday fatalities, and the next best was in 1995 when there were just two deaths.  Okay there are a lot of other factors that cause accidents, like alcohol(22%), being distracted (25%), failing to give way (21%), and speed (19%).  But if you know that by going over the speed limit just a little it could cost you then you do take a bit of extra care.

So perhaps as a nation we are making progress.   Afterall, we’ve canned the use of hand held phones in the car, and texting is a big no no.  We’re all a lot more conscious of the effects of alcohol but perhaps there should be zero tolerance there as well.  And by being speed aware, you know, just maybe, we are all just getting a little more mature about these things.