The NZ Transport Agency has hit the headlines over its own staff failing to heed its own advertising messages – and breaking speed limits, sometimes by significant amounts.
The agency says it is going to regularly publish information on travel speeds recorded by GPS units fitted to the 147 vehicles in the agency’s corporate fleet, following the release earlier today of GPS speed data from October 2014 to June 2015 to the New Zealand Herald in response to a request made under the Official Information Act
The agency is being forced to be forward on the issue, as the results showed that for the relatively small number of vehicles, some 212,340 incidents of speeding – an incident being measured by the maximum speed in any 500m section.
The vast majority were for just over 100km/h, but 8,135 were for between 111-120km/h, 129 for 121-130km/h and 8 for 141-150km/h.
The system is unable to register speeding offences under 100km/h.
Transport Agency Chief Executive Geoff Dangerfield says staff are expected to follow the laws the agency promotes/
“Our clear expectation is that our people will drive at safe speeds at all times,” Dangerfield says. “Safe travel speeds are a fundamental part of the safe transport system which the Transport Agency and our road safety partners are working hard to create for all New Zealanders.
“When our own people drive at unsafe speeds it not only compromises their own safety, it also put other road users at risk, and it potentially undermines our role as a road safety advocate,” he explains. “Road safety is part of our DNA as an organisation – it is a core value of the Transport Agency and we need to model the driving behaviour which we are asking other New Zealanders to adopt, it’s as simple as that.”
Dangerfield says while no travel at speeds over legal limits by staff is condoned, it is also important to put the GPS data in context. More than half (53%) of all the speeding instances recorded by GPS units have been for speeds of 101km/h or 102km/h, less than 5% have been for speeds over 110km/h, and less than half of one percent have been for speeds over 120km/h.
Data from the GPS units shows that from October to June Transport Agency fleet vehicles travelled more than 1.76 million kilometres.
Dangerfield says the Transport Agency has reminded all staff of the need to travel at safe speeds at all times, and several staff had been spoken to individually in relation to specific cases of driving at unsafe speeds. The Transport Agency has also recently updated its corporate safe driving policy to provide an additional emphasis on safe speeds.
