Do you know what the most pointless piece of road safety advice is? Drive to the conditions. 

I get it and it’s well-meaning. But it’s pointless. A waste of breath. Because some people are incapable of doing it. 

And it would seem from some of the reports in the past 24 hours about those two buses which went off the road yesterday on the Twizel-Tekapo highway after hitting black ice, that perhaps the drivers of those buses knew nothing about how you should be driving in sub-zero temperatures.  

So they either didn’t know how to drive to the conditions - or just didn’t care.  

This isn’t a one-off, either, by the way, and, I reckon the time has come for us to stop mucking around with this “drive to the conditions” nonsense and do one of two things. 

We either follow the lead of some European countries and make winter tyres mandatory on all vehicles. Or, as soon as we know temperatures are going to be sub-zero where there’s a state highway, we close the road. We don’t wait around until the road is frozen over and it’s too late. 

I see the guy in charge of the bus company involved in yesterday’s crashes is disputing any suggestion that they were going too fast.  He would say that, though, wouldn’t he? 

It’s not like he’s going to come out and say ‘oh yeah, those muppets I pay to drive my buses have got no idea about driving to the conditions’. 

So, instead of relying on some bus company owner in Auckland, I’m going to give more credence to the eyewitness account of a chap by the name of Tony McClelland, who was on the road at the time. I bet he isn’t buying what the bus company guy is saying, either.  

He was driving from Christchurch to Omarama. And he’s been in the news saying that the road conditions on that highway yesterday morning were the worst he’s ever seen. 

He hit black ice himself near Tekapo Airport, nearly lost control of his van and almost ended up in a ditch. So he called the police and asked them to close the road. 

Here’s a quote from what he’s saying: “You're looking at minus-5, minus-4 degrees, foggy conditions - that State Highway should have been closed. No doubt and it wasn't. There's just a big black sign up by the airfield saying 'dangerous conditions, black ice'. That's how people die."  

Thankfully, no one did die. One person has serious injuries and two others have moderate injuries. And thank goodness those buses ended-up where they did - off the road and not in the middle of it. 

But back to Tony McLelland. Once he’d called the cops, asking them to close the road, he thought about turning back but decided to press-on. But he stuck to 60kph. And it wasn’t long after that that he saw these two buses “flying out of the fog”. That’s what he’s saying. 

And here’s how he describes what he saw. "They were not doing 60. They were not doing 80. They were doing at least 100, probably a little bit more." 

And he obviously drives that road quite a bit, because he says it’s not uncommon to see drivers hoofing along at 100 kph during winter, when there’s black ice on the road. 

But this sort of nutbar driving happens everywhere. Less than two weeks ago, police caught a driver doing 134 kph in icy, foggy conditions on the road to Aoraki/Mt Cook - with the whole family on board. 

This was on State Highway 80. It was around minus-3. 

The day after that, the police came out with a warning, saying the number of people driving at “horrendous” speeds in winter conditions is appalling. 

Over a two-week period, 26 people had been caught doing speeds over 120 kph in icy conditions.  

So what happened yesterday isn’t an isolated one-off. It’s happening on an all-too-regular basis and just telling people to “drive to the conditions” is worthy, but lame. 

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