Simeon Brown has reached deep into his bag of culture war topics and come up with an unusual one, we need to increase speed around schools and make safety worse because we need to balance kids safety with convenience and saving fractions of time in getting somewhere quicker.
From the Beehive Website:
The Coalition Government will reverse Labour’s blanket speed limit reductions by 1 July 2025 through a new Land Transport Rule released for public consultation today, Transport Minister Simeon Brown says.
The draft speed limit rule will deliver on the National-ACT coalition commitment to reverse the previous government’s blanket speed limit reductions. It will ensure that when speed limits are set, economic impacts – including travel times – and the views of road users and local communities are taken into account, alongside safety.
“The previous government’s untargeted approach slowed Kiwis and the economy down, rather than targeting high crash areas of the network,” Mr Brown says.
“Our draft speed limit rule will require speed limits that have been reduced since 1 January 2020 to be reversed on local streets, arterial roads, and state highways. It will also require variable speed limits outside schools during pick up and drop off times to keep young New Zealanders safe.
“Local streets outside a school will be required to have a 30km/h variable speed limit during school travel times. Rural roads that are outside schools will be required to have variable speed limits of 60km/h or less.”
The policy change was part of National’s election policy and featured in the National-Act Coalition agreement.
It completely ignores the wealth of information that suggests that the previous policy particularly relating to schools was important.
For instance the Waka Kotahi website states:
Setting safe speed limits around all schools improves actual and perceived safety to encourage and enable more active travel to and from school which is important for healthy communities. It also reduces the risk to tamariki and whānau of being killed or seriously injured while travelling to or from school.
And Auckland Transport’s website says this:
We know that where safe and appropriate speed limits have been implemented injuries and deaths have reduced. Data from the first phase of speed limit changes in June 2020, showed a 30 percent reduction in deaths and a 21 percent reduction in serious injuries. In comparison, across all Auckland roads for the time period (24 months), road deaths increased by 9 percent.
Setting safe and appropriate speeds is an effective tool to save lives and prevent debilitating injuries. It could also save the life of someone you know and care about.
If we don’t set safe speeds and current rates of road harm continue, over the next five years one in two Aucklanders will be personally connected to someone seriously injured or killed on our roads.
If you want to understand the brutal reality of what happens on Auckland’s roads then how about this?
And if you want to realise how bad the country’s road safety record is then check this graph out.
Road fatalities per 100,000 population 2018 International Transport Forum’s Road Safety Annual Report 2020 – OECD countries
Brown’s announcement also completely ignores the usual expectation that Local Government should make these decisions on behalf of their communities.
Why is Brown doing this? You can’t help but wonder that one of the reasons for the policy, persuading kids to walk or cycle to school, is an anathema to him and he prefers that they be driven. Because that will be one of the consequences of this change in the policy.
The policy will no doubt increase the rate of deaths and serious injuries outside of schools and reduce kids walking and cycling between home and school.
I am struggling to see what the up side is.
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress