Editorial

Welcome back, and I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and New Year. As I said in the EDM a couple of weeks ago, entry into the New

Year for many was a mix of relief on the one hand and apprehension on the other. There’s no question the overarching Covid-19 crisis is far from over, but neither are several other more localised problems.

Some of you will have read an editorial I wrote a while back where I contemplated the purchase of a radar detector to protect myself against the rate of increase and variance in gazetted speed limits. You won’t be surprised to hear I received the expected ‘tut-tut’ communication from WakaKotahi NZTA. The writer was pleasant, and I learned that having a kaleidoscope of speed limits was the answer, that surfaces were not ideal but resurfacing is expensive and the focus is on improving ‘safety’ via the addition of extra road furniture and ‘safer’ speeds. I also learned that apps and speed-indicating navigation devices would be more worthwhile than a detector, which doesn’t tell the driver what the limit is. Putting the initial points aside for later, I can absolutely attest that the apps and navigation devices currently available cannot keep up with the rate of change in speed limits.

Over the Christmas period, I racked up some serious kilometres. One of the roadies I was looking forward to – in a pseudo-masochistic sort of way – was the Spring Creek-to-Nelson trip on

SH6, with its plethora of new speed limits in the 60 to 90kph range. I concluded from the experience that if the highway from the Wairau River bridge to Rai Valley is now 90kph, then the agenda, without doubt, is a national drop to 90kph in open-road speed limits on all carriageways not gazetted motorway or expressway. If that stretch warrants such a speed, then SH5 Napier to Taupo and SH3 Hamilton to New Plymouth must be just around the corner. What we on the outside are not getting through our heads with this wholesale unopposed lowering of speed limits is that we will never get back everyone we lose. Once it’s done, it’s done. And neither am I opposed to reducing speed limits where it’s logical to do so. Speaking about the same stretch of road (SH6), the open-road speed limit along Queen Elizabeth Drive that existed for years was absurd. It should have been 80kph half a decade ago.

The irritation for me is we never gave the old speed limits a chance because they were never enforced. You can’t say 100kph was too fast when vast numbers of the populous weren’t doing it in the first place. I guarantee that we will hear reports of accidents in the new ‘safer’ speed zone being caused by speed. Let’s say it’s a stretch of road that’s been dropped from 100kph to 80kph. Before the rebranding, ‘speed’ represented something over 100kph, now it might mean anything over 80kph. A motorist who was doing 90kph and considered ‘safe’ last Friday when the speed limit was 100kph, is now a lunatic on Monday after the new 80kph sign went up over the weekend?

While the root of the issue lay in broader secular education, I argue the dayto-day problem with the old speed limit was the utter failure to enforce it. I do my best to always travel at the posted speed limit, and I’m continuously being caught by traffic. It’s relentless. I’ve said before on any number of occasions that the irony in all this is enforcing speed is easily done with the government’s ubiquitous elixir to everything – tech. The problem is that the safety mantra begins to lose its appeal when votes are at risk.

Government departments love tech, and tech can fix this. We’re an affluent welfare state, so it’s logical we’re not going to be overly great at social obedience. Why aren’t new drivers ringfenced with zero speeding infringements for the first two years? Why aren’t double-cabbed 4x4 utes, the 21st century’s answer to the primal hunting spear, speed-limited to 104kph?

The truth from my roadies is this: On the run into Nelson, I was just a menace to a

Kiwi driving public utterly contemptuous of the rules that govern their right to personal mobility, and until we get on top of that, ‘safer speed zones’ are simply another form of tax.