National is promising to undo blanket speed limit reductions if elected to government – a move welcomed by the road freight industry.
It says this will return many state highways to 100km/h from 80km/h, and many local roads to 50km/h from 30km/h, while designing new highways for 110 km/h.
National transport spokesperson Simeon Brown says Labour “exposed its anti-car ideology” by introducing blanket speed limit reductions as part of its ‘Road to Zero’ road safety campaign.
“New highways like Transmission Gully and the Kapiti Expressway near Wellington were designed for vehicles to travel at 110km/h but Labour has mostly imposed a 100km/h speed limit. Both roads will rise to 110km/h under National.
“All around the country, Labour has cut speeds on many highways from 100km/h to 80 by ignoring economic impacts including travel times, and by giving insufficient weight to road users’ and local communities’ views,” Brown says.
“It makes no sense to have roads that can safely accommodate higher speed limits, only to require motorists to drive more slowly.
“The reductions which were part of Labour’s expensive ‘Road to Zero’ road safety campaign, have not worked,” he says.
The road toll was 350 in 2019 when ‘Road to Zero’ was introduced, and it rose to 374 last year.
Road freight body Transporting NZ says it welcomes the political debate on rethinking speed limit reductions.
Transporting NZ interim chief executive Dom Kalasih says it’s critical that government policy takes into consideration safety, environment and productivity, and a scientific, risk-based approach rather than blanket limits on whole roads.
“The current approach is one dimensional and nonsensical,” Kalasih says.
“We’re seeing proposals to reduce sections of road from 100km/h down to 40km/h even when engineers have advised the safe and appropriate speed limit is much higher.
“The road network is the workplace of our members so as much as anyone we want a safe network. But variations and inconsistencies like this make no sense and in fact will make it very hard for drivers to have any idea what the speed limit actually is,” he says.
“We’ve heard it might cost $30 million to reverse what’s been done but on the flip side, with what’s happening now it could add 15 minutes to a transport operator’s daily travel time, particularly if operating on rural roads.
“As the charge-out rate for a truck and trailer unit could be about $200 an hour, the loss of productivity could be unnecessarily costing the country an additional $25 million every day with no equivalent gains in safety,”
“We’ve been calling this problem out for a long time now and it’s great to see that there is now a solid political debate about road speeds as we believe we need a sensible rethink of this,” Kalasih says.
