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.
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.
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.
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 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.
https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/news/2022/lower-speed-limits-dont-just-save-lives-they-make-nz-towns-and-cities-better-places-to-live.html
OK, but this is talking about urban speed limits, whereas National’s focus is mostly on open road limits.
No it isn’t, they’ve said they’re rolling back both
They’ve said they’re rolling them back unless it wouldn’t be safe to do so, and most of their press talks about open road limits.
It sounds like most of the urban limits will stay.
Yes I did read the article, thanks for the opening ad hominem.
As I’ve said in another reply:
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 also initially thought that was the case, but it’s not! http://warp.povusers.org/grrr/collisionmath.html There’s no difference between 80km/h against a pole or wall vs 80km/h head on.
Fascinating! TYVM for that.
Though, I’ll argue that even in my flawed examples having double the number of vehicles in the collision is still worse: double the casualties. It’s just technically the same as two vehicles having independent collisions.
Oh, also: it improves the effectiveness of lowering the speed limit versus infrastructure upgrades.
Neat.
Lol, we’re talking about driving at 100 kmh here. Tad melodramatic, don’t you think?
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
It’s been years since I was tested for alcohol, although I’m not often on the roads at typical drink driving hours.
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.
Interesting! I’ve never seen a WoF stop or child seat compliance stop.
Sorry, registration not WoF.
Yeah, the child seat one was a real surprise.
Do you do much driving after dark? When I look back, I think every alcohol checkpoint I’ve been through has been after dark. And I’m pretty sure they check WoF (not rego) at the same time since it’s right there on the driver’s side, but I haven’t seen a checkpoint specifically for WoF (or rego). I have heard of people getting tickets for no rego after having sweeps of car parks done, but I don’t think this is police-led.
Hardly drive at all actually, compared to when I was younger. Generally night time driving is “home from the restaurant”.
My experience is very anecdotal and definitely had selection bias for my small amount of travel.
We moved where the work was so family all live a long way away, so we spend many evenings driving to visit. They aren’t exactly common but I think we probably go through one a year on average.
I’ve had both (in the far north).
To be fair, I’ve been tested several times this year alone. All of them were in the morning, twice when heading to work and once when dropping the kids off at school.
I thought the timing was extremely weird tho