Road safety advocates warn the Government's Road to Zero programme isn't being rolled out fast enough, or on the scale needed, to prevent deaths.
This year alone, 216 people have already been killed in accidents and experts say that number will get significantly higher.
"This year, at this stage, we're looking at about 350-360 deaths on the roads," Dylan Thomsen, AA Road Safety spokesperson, told Newshub.
The AA said with this year's record high petrol prices, that number should be way down.
"Normally when fuel prices go up, you see road deaths come down - that's the traditional relationship," Thomsen said.
"To have a situation where we know that people are actually driving less, but road deaths have gone up, that's a really unusual situation and that's one of the reasons we're particularly concerned right now."
Road Safety advocates said the Road to Zero programme isn't moving fast enough.
"We are seeing some progress in certain areas, like speed interventions, but we're not seeing the scale of what we'd like to see," Caroline Perry, Brake NZ director, told Newshub.
The Government's Road to Zero campaign ultimately wants to see no deaths at all.
To get there, one of its targets is to have 1000km of median barriers added to our roads by 2030. If we're on track, in 2024, there should be 400km installed.
But the programme's latest figures show up until the end of last year, only 50km worth of barriers were added.
The Transport Minister admits the targets are ambitious and said the programme needs to ramp up.
"The initial figures have been lower than we would've anticipated there. Essentially that's because once Waka Kotahi has got into the work, it ends up being a bigger job than what you might expect," Michael Wood told Newshub.
"The monitoring report does reveal there are areas where we need to push on ... but I'm confident they'll make good progress over the coming years."
The AA said it's infrastructure like median barriers, that will help reduce the number of people killed on our roads.
"If you put a median barrier down a higher speed road, you're probably going to get a reduction between 60-90 percent in fatal and serious crashes," Thomsen said.
"When you have a higher quality highway, and a median barrier, year after year after year from that point on - you will have very few fatal or serious crashes."
Students Against Dangerous Driving said it's not just infrastructure that needs improvements, but our culture around driving.
