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.
Thanks for your insights! I think we’re on the same page, I agree that some roads should be 80km/hour instead of 100. And indeed, risk of an injury crash seems to double from 80 to 100. I don’t mind the couple of extra minutes.
I just see the police checking for speed too often on roads where it’s easy to go over the limit, like the Kapiti Expressway, where I believe they should focus on e.g. 50km/h areas, checking for red light runners, alcohol, and tailgating.
Interesting! I have never seen police on the Transmission Gully/Kāpitiexpressway stretch of road except for police travelling along it. Never seen a speed trap.
I also think we are headed for a future with police playing a smaller part in speed detection (and cameras playing a bigger part).
We could probably keep many of the 80kph roads at 100kph if you had confidence people would actually drive at 100. Camera enforcement will play a big part in future I feel, the culture change to get people sticking to the posted speed limit.
In The Netherlands, speed traps are done by a separate unit, they’re not police officers. It’s also fully automated and a separate speed tracked process within the legal system, anything below 30 km/h is fully automated & car owners are automatically invoiced and assumed in the wrong if caught in a speed trap. You have to go through many loops to appeal. It’s a massive cash grab system and seen as just another tax as it’s used to pay for completely unrelated things, like free school books.
While most people adhere to the limits, many people still exceed the limits as it’s mostly safe to do so.
The low road toll there is mainly contributed to the very safe roads, and e.g. no crossings and traffic lights at 100km/hour roads, like here in NZ.
One problem NZ has is that things are far away from each other, and it’s mountainous.
That means we spend a lot more time driving long distance than people in The Netherlands, and this driving is largely on long, windy, poor quality roads. The roads are poor quality because we need so many of them compared to the population.
We have less than 20 people per km^2, vs The Netherland’s 500+.
Yep true, think my comparison is not entirely fair. Also, in NL the taxes are a lot higher; e.g. road tax / month for a petrol car is what we pay here per YEAR, diesel cars are even more expensive. Plus, there’s an additional tax on new vehicles.