Many people don’t know that Tāmaki Makaurau has a poor record when it comes to rangatahi Māori safety on our roads, with serious injuries and deaths proportionately greater than other parts of our population.
I was reminded by one of the tribal leaders to look past the stats and numbers as they are someone’s moko, sister, brother, daughter, son, friend, who is lost to our communities.
A couple of years ago while I was at Auckland Transport, I led the design of a programme Te Ara Haepapa to raise awareness and work with whānau, hapū and iwi and hapori Māori to reduce this.
In 2019 I was asked to elevate Te Ara Haepapa into a strategy to sit in parallel with the Vision Zero Strategy-as one death is too many-in Tāmaki Makaurau. The strategy also comes with a detailed Action Plan and monitoring framework.
The model takes a Treaty based approach, including decision-making, and is a co-design approach with communities using kaupapa Māori methods. There is buy-in across sector agencies for this approach.
One death is far too many and I’m looking forward to seeing how agencies implement this strategy and plan as we need a different approach with our communities.