Alternative headline: National to spend $30m to sacrifice some of your lives so our trip is slightly faster.
The changes have been endorsed by transport researchers and street safety advocates as effective measures to help reduce the number of Kiwis killed and injured on the roads.
That’s all there is to it.
National to actually spend money on safety upgrades and road maintenance, rather than the band-aid solution of lowering speed limits.
Seriously, the evidence this actually works is tenuous at best, and that’s assuming people actually follow the new limits.
There’s also a number of routes, the new Kapiti expressway for example, that could handle much higher limits, and in fact frequently do handle vehicles travelling much faster.
Speaking to media today, Hipkins claimed it appeared National was simply re-announcing what the Government’s stated position was.
Labour are also saying this is more or less their policy, so it doesn’t sound like they will be much different at all.
Yep totally agreed. 100 feels so slow there. Should be 120 or so.
I’m all for lowering speed limits in urban areas.
Also there should be more focus on other things like alcohol testing, fatigue, keeping distance, etc. But speed is easier to test and brings in cash.
I’ve been trying to follow this story and the evidence underpinning the decision. That is based upon te published data for killied and seriously injured.(KSI). Any alternate approach at this time is not providing evidence, that I have been able to pick up. It seems more like a power / votes opportunity rather than a well founded argument. Despite it being unpopular, like when we mandated seatbels in 1983,I still suppot the reduced speed limits unti the evidece says otherwise.
There should be more focus on alcohol in my opinion. Speed is always a contributing factor but not often the causing factor. Keeping distance is another one many people need to understand better.
But lowering speed limits is easier and also brings in easy money as speed testing is very efficient.
I think it’s worth understanding why they are targeting speeds. It’s not revenue collection. Road to Zero is the idea that people make mistakes, and they shouldn’t have to pay with their lives.
In the past: They weren’t paying attention, hit a truck, it’s their fault they died.
Now: They weren’t paying attention, hit a truck, how could we have prevented it? Let’s install a median separator.
Basically, accepting people make mistakes, and looking for ways to stop this meaning they have to die.
The reason they are targeting speed is related to this. If you get drunk and drive and hit a power pole, if you do drugs and drive and hit a power pole, if you use your phone while driving and hit a power pole, if your kid distracts you and you hit a power pole, these are all different causes but the result is the same. You hit a power pole.
Now if you’re driving at 100KPH, the result of this accident is that you or someone in your vehicle probably dies or gets a life-long injury. If you’re driving at 80KPH, chances are you walk away from the crash, or at least can recover fully within a few months.
The idea of reduced speed limits is simply that people are going to make mistakes, people are going to crash, and when this happens we should prioritise life over saving 3 minutes on your commute.
That’s a very long winded way of saying fixing the underlying issues is too hard, so we’re just going to slow everyone down.
Exactly this.
Greater speed makes every collision and accident worse.
We can save lives, already involved in collisions, by reducing the speed at which those collisions happen.
Thanks for your insights! I think we’re on the same page, I agree that some roads should be 80km/hour instead of 100. And indeed, risk of an injury crash seems to double from 80 to 100. I don’t mind the couple of extra minutes.
I just see the police checking for speed too often on roads where it’s easy to go over the limit, like the Kapiti Expressway, where I believe they should focus on e.g. 50km/h areas, checking for red light runners, alcohol, and tailgating.
The chart that Dave posted is pretty inconclusive, in my view. It don’t think you can compare this to seatbelts, the evidence for seatbelts working is overwhelming.
A chart summarises the data. The outcry against seatbelts at the time was similar to the antivax arguments, which are based upon views rather than just data.
I have to agree the chart is inconclusive. COVID messes up the later years which also happen to be the ones after road to zero started.
I think National claiming it isn’t working is a bit ridiculous though, like investing in shares, seeing the price drop in one year, then deciding investing doesn’t work.
Have you read the entire article? I’m absolutely not a National fan but they’re not saying that they will reverse all changes, only there were it’s safe to do so. Essentially what the current plan is, perhaps at less places.
Also, they want to focus on other things than speed, eg on alcohol testing.
National will encourage police to increase the use of breath testing and we will fix roadside drug testing legislation so police can effectively test drivers for drugs.
I’m from The Netherlands where we have an absurd focus on speed, and speed testing. It has got nothing to do with safety where they are testing, it’s just another tax.
I’ve got my license 25 years or so and have only been tested for alcohol once. Never in my ten years in New Zealand. That’s crazy. One in five fatal crashes is caused by alcohol.
Might be where you’re living or when you’re driving? I’ve had a few breath tests heading home from work around the times you’d expect people might be heading home for tea after an after work drink.
I’ve driven at times when people are expected to drink, at night, at Friday afternoon, etc. Never tested once. And I’ve probably been speed tested thousands of times.
I’ve been tested twice in the 30 years I’ve been driving. Both of them before I was 20.
I assume there’s confirmation bias in that I’m not driving at the same times in the same places as I was 20 or so, but I’ve never even seen a breath stop since.
Plenty of WoF stops though, and one child seat compliance stop.
Im from Germany and greatly prefer driving in the Netherlands to Germany. Traffic simply flows in NL, whereas in Germany you’ll always have some fanatics driving 250+ kph in the left lane, causing hiccups in traffic flow. Plus the roadrage is real in D.
Guten tag :) I have always preferred driving in Germany, I’ve found them the best drivers in Europe when we did road trips. As people can go 200+ km on the left lane, they anticipate much better. I remember Dutch people were called NL, Nur Links, as they would stick too long in the left hand lane. Also found that people were more polite in Germany.
But perhaps it’s all perception then!
Goede middag!
Seems like a classic grass is greener on the other side thing :) I guess if you have to deal with traffic on a day to day basis, you’ll end up hating it either way.
I’m just envious of the Dutch. The infrastructure is simply amazing. Everyone has near equal rights, be it cars, bikes or pedestrians. And the OV is just leagues ahead of the ÖPNV in Germany!
Anywho, this is a NZ community, so I should probably shut up :D
Yes I did read the article, thanks for the opening ad hominem.
As I’ve said in another reply:
Greater speed makes every collision and accident worse.
We can save lives, already involved in collisions, by reducing the speed at which those collisions happen.
There is exactly one action you can take to mitigate the severity of someone else’s mistake in a collision: reduce your speed.
How many lives, including your own, are worth taking to satiate your need for speed?
Yes think we’re on the same page. I have absolutely no need for speed anymore (I did when I was younger, I admit), I just don’t think it makes sense to limit speed on certain roads at 100km / hour like the Kapiti Expressway. It should be 120km/h IMO. Police is checking for speed there very often as it’s an easy cash grab, but I hardly see them in 50km/h areas where it’s much less safe to go over the limit.
Yeah I think we are on the same page, nobody argues harder than two people who agree with eachother.
When I was a testosterone charged teen/20yo speed was all important. I grew out of it, many do not.
And yes, modern divided highways/motorways can and should be higher limited. Most are not modern nor divided. The Waikato expressway is 110km/h. It’s great.
Also, if I hit a pole at 120km/h then the impact speed is 120km/h. If I have a head-on at 80km/h then the impact speed is 160km/h. So physically segregating traffic is the most effective infrastructure change to make, it is slow and expensive and impractical in most places.
Lowering limits on old crappy roads is the cheapest and therefore most efficient option.
I think it’s generous to take what they say at face value. They often slap on this sort of handwaving away of the predictable negative outcomes of whatever they’re proposing to roll back. It’s not actually backed up with anything - it’s just designed to let them have it both ways.
Kinda like their tax cuts they say won’t be inflationary, and their foreign buyer ban relaxation that they say somehow won’t lead to house prices going up.
the predictable negative outcomes of whatever they’re proposing to roll back.
The evidence that lower speed limits actually helps is pretty tenuous, and there’s also the lost time and productivity to consider.
It seems to depend on where you count your costs and benefits, and who is included in that.
Research seems to say that lower speeds are beneficial to society overall in a range of ways, National only seem to be counting car drivers and their right to continue taking up most of our public road space at the expense of everyone else.
The only upside that I can see to reverting back to old speed limits, is the marbre maintaining vailability of childrens organs for a transplant. As ever, more porer pedestrians killed than welthy pedestrians who live outside the towns and cities.
