Police are warning drivers to keep off their phones and pay attention to their surroundings with Easter weekend and the school holidays starting tomorrow.<\/p>\n
Last year’s Easter road toll was four, down from seven in 2024. <\/p>\n
Inspector Ash Tabb, Canterbury district prevention manager, said: “There’s an increased number of vehicles on the roads. A lot of people are unfamiliar, particularly who don’t normally drive on the open roads, so the speeds are faster. There is the difference in traffic as well.<\/p>\n
“You’ve got slower vehicles and faster vehicles. So that mix can make it a little bit more dangerous.”<\/p>\n
So far in 2026, 86 people have died on our roads \u2013 the highest figure at this point in the year since 2022.<\/p>\n
And as people hit the road, police have advice on how to stay safe. <\/p>\n
“Making sure people are wearing seatbelts, people are not impaired and that’s not just drugs and alcohol that can be sleep making sure people sleep before a long trip and take rests, speed an obvious one, speed may not cause a crash but the damage is far higher for the higher speed and cellphones, do not use a cellphone put it to one side and forget it during the journey,” Tabb said. <\/p>\n
He added it’s important to keep the focus on the driving. <\/p>\n
“Making sure that you’re taking good breaks, making sure you’re aware of what’s going on around you and just focusing on the drive rather than the destination.” <\/p>\n
Police will be out in force too. <\/p>\n
“We have additional staff out on the roading network, particularly at the peak times, the afternoon before the actual long weekend such as today… during this Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and a lot of people will travel on the Monday so we’ll have extra staff out on the Monday as well” Tabb said. <\/p>\n
While fuel prices might keep people closer to home over the easter break this year, police said shorter trips or fewer cars on the road doesn’t eliminate risk. <\/p>\n
“It might be just an hour away, but the messaging is still the same. They’ve just got to make sure they drive safely.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Police are warning drivers to keep off their phones and pay attention to their surroundings with Easter weekend…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360110,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[158,42,43,40,38,41,39,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-360109","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-christchurch-canterbury","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-top-news","12":"tag-top-stories","13":"tag-topnews","14":"tag-topstories","15":"tag-transport"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}