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Speed limits start going back up, full list of roads announced (www.rnz.co.nz)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Reversals on blanket speed limit reductions will begin on Wednesday night, starting with State Highway 2 in the Wairarapa, and will be complete by 1 July.

The National and Act coalition agreement committed to reversing the reductions implemented under the previous Labour government.

In total 38 sections of the state highway network will be reversed back to their previous higher speed limits by NZTA over the next five months.

The state highway speed limit changes will take effect across the country in Northland, Auckland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Gisborne, Hawke's Bay, Manawatu-Whanganui, Greater Wellington, Canterbury, and the top of the South Island.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

It's worth noting the reason for the speed limit changes. Physics.

Many countries (apparently not the UK) have been adopting a Vision Zero style policy, that originated in Sweden some decades ago. The idea is to have a multifaceted approach with an overarching believe than no one should die just travelling from one place to another.

To do this, you look at why people die. We have already introduced a lower alcohol limit and (controversial) drug driving checks. But one of the tenets of Vision Zero is accepting that people are human. Personal responsibility sure, but crashes very often involve innocent parties. When a drunk driver drives off the road and kills a pedestrian, we don't say that pedestrian shouldn't have been walking on the footpath.

So Vision Zero (I've called it this in my comment but in NZ it was branded "Road to zero") says if people are going to crash, what can we do about it? What we want to do is reduce the consequences. We put up dividing barriers so if you drift over the centre line you aren't going to drive into oncoming traffic. We put up barriers along the sides in higher risk areas. We try to make our roads straighter, flatter, wider, more boring. And also what we do is we reduce speed limits. A crash releases double the energy at 120kph as one at 80kph does.

And as a final note, if you want driving to be exciting, please keep it to the race track. While reducing speed limits is (mostly) not about reducing crashes caused by speed, there are crashes caused by speed, and too often they are from people being dicks driving like it's a race track.