Speeding up the Kāpiti Expressway to 100km/h

Residents aged over 60 paid a visit to MP Tim Costley (front, right) in Parliament last week. He is submitting a permission on increasing expressway speed limits.

OPINION

Last week our Minister of Transport, Simeon Brown, announced that NZTA are opening public consultation on changing the speed limit on our expressway to 110km/h.

I’m strongly encouraging everyone to have their say. Consultation opens on Monday.

The last National Government funded and started all our local expressways. They were designed and built to be safe at higher speeds, just like the new Waikato expressways are already 110km/h. It’s time to speed up our region.

It’s important to note this will be just the section between Ōtaki and Raumati. At each end there will be a section at 100km/h (1.6km at the northern end) so there is no change to safety with how traffic moves from the expressway to 100km/h on a single lane and then to 80km/h as we hit the awful road from Ōtaki to Levin. But don’t worry, National will build the four-lane expressway all the way to the north of Levin!

Whether you live in Horowhenua or Kāpiti, this road is integral to our region, and like me you probably drive it regularly. Increasing the speed safely can increase productivity, help us to grow our economy, and it also aligns it with roads in Waikato and Bay of Plenty built to the same safety standards, but currently we’re the slowest of them all. The last Government wanted to slow us down with 30km/h around town; we want to speed our community and our economy up.

The easiest way to support this is to head to https://www.national.org.nz/makekapitiexpressway110 or my Facebook page, sign my petition to increase the speed, and I’ll submit all the names together before submissions close.