Lowering speed limits a cheap fix?
Plans to lower speed limits on roads across the country have been met with fierce opposition from communities and industry, who claim it is a cheap fix for poorly maintained roads.
But the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) says reducing speed limits is just one step in addressing our high rates of road trauma.
There are 22 speed limit reviews under way as part of the Government’s road safety strategy, which aims to reduce deaths and serious injuries on our roads.
Road Transport Forum chief executive Nick Leggett said the reviews were ‘‘death by a thousand cuts’’.
‘‘It is the cheap and nasty way of trying to address the problem, but it is not going to address the problem. It is going to lead to a whole lot of other problems.’’
He had concerns that ideology, not safety, was the primary driver behind the speed limit cuts. ‘‘There will be blanket speed reductions, and we will not see the corresponding wins in terms of lives saved and fewer injuries.
‘‘New Zealand roads have been run down and are not in a quality that maintains safety. You need to be investing more in them, especially when you have a massive surplus.’’
Leggett said New Zealand’s economy relied on road freight transport, and the industry relied on timeliness to move goods as efficiently and effectively as possible. Reducing speed limits was not only a ‘‘handbrake on productivity’’, but would make for frustrated drivers who were more likely to take risks.
Leggett said driver behaviour was a big cause of accidents.
‘‘We know that people who die in accidents as a result of speed in most cases have been breaking the law. Is reducing it to 80kmh going to stop them from doing that, particularly if the road speed environment isn’t altered?’’
Australasian College of Road Safety president Martin Small said that if lowering speed limits was considered a cheap fix, the alternative was building motorway-standard roads across the state highway network, which would come at an ‘‘extraordinary’’ cost.
Small said he hadn’t seen evidence in other countries that lowering speed limits caused ‘‘economic ruin’’, as had been suggested.
‘‘There is plenty of evidence to suggest lowering speed limits dramatically reduces fatalities and serious injuries on any particular stretch of road – and where there are increases in limits, the opposite occurs.’’
One of the proposed changes, a reduction from 100kmh to 80kmh along 110 kilometres of State Highway 6 between Nelson and Blenheim, has been met with a strong public backlash, including a 11,500-signature petition. In the last 10 years, 20 people died on that stretch of SH6 and another 92 were seriously injured.
NZTA manager Lisa Rossiter said New Zealand was one of the worst-performing countries in the OECD when it came to road safety.
In June, NZTA released information that estimated 87 per cent of the country’s roads had speed limits that were too high for the conditions, and that only 5 per cent of the open road should have the current 100kmh limit.
Rossiter said that while speed treatments were relatively lowcost, they were only one way of addressing risk, and not the only action NZTA was taking. The Government had invested $1.4 billion to make tangible infrastructure improvements on state highways and local roads.
She said it was a common criticism was that drivers needed to be better trained. ‘‘Except humans are human, and they are not perfect, and they make mistakes.’’
She said the difference between dying in a road accident and walking away from it came down to the speed at the time of the crash, and the vehicle. Speed limit reductions were about reducing harm and making crashes more survivable.
Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter has previously said it would ‘‘make sense’’ to reduce limits on some roads with lower traffic volumes.
National Party transport spokesman Chris Bishop said that while some of the proposed speed reductions made sense, it was important to investigate the evidence base and make sure there was public support for the proposals.
‘‘The Government has cut $5 billion from the state highway budget, and instead of getting on and building new roads which we need, they are just focusing on safety improvements.’’
‘‘Roads have been run down . . . You need to be investing more in them.’’
Nick Leggett,
Road Transport Forum chief executive