When Cabinet agreed in September to raise speed limits on the roads, it knew this would cause more deaths and serious injuries.
Composite image / NZ Herald
When Cabinet agreed in September to raise speed limits on the roads, it knew this would cause more deaths and serious injuries.
Composite image / NZ Herald
This is likely to lead to more people dying on the roads, according to official advice presented to Transport Minister Simeon Brown and Cabinet.
The minister says the higher speed limits will help grow the economy, but Cabinet has released no evidence for this.
ANALYSIS
When Cabinet agreed in September to raise speed limits on many of our roads, it did so after receiving advice from the Ministry of Transport (MoT) that this ran the risk of more deaths and serious injuries.
“Speed is a contributing factor to the number and outcomesof crashes on our roads,” the ministry told Cabinet in a briefing paper.
”Where the average speed increases, the risk of fatal and serious crashes also increases.”
The paper refers to a large body of research. The advice was supported by the NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) and came to light with the release of Cabinet papers last month.
The Herald asked Transport Minister Simeon Brown to confirm Cabinet had rejected this advice. He declined to answer.
Brown has justified the higher speed limits on two grounds. The first is efficiency: he said they will “enable Kiwis to get to where they want to go quickly and safely” and help “unlock economic growth and productivity”.
But Cabinet has not released any evidence to support this claim. Nor will the minister confirm if any exists.
Nor did Cabinet release any information on the cost of having a higher number of serious crashes. The minister also declined to answer questions about this.
Brown’s second argument is the Government has a better approach to road safety, involving “clear targets to ensure police are focused on the most high-risk times, behaviours, and locations”.
“Drugged and drunk driving is the largest killer on our roads,” he has said, “and will be a top priority for this Government, rather than just simply slowing motorists down.”
But Cabinet has released no evidence to support the minister’s approach that this new priority should replace lower speeds.
We asked the minister why he sees this as an either/or and he stressed the value of the new approach but otherwise declined to answer.
Is he right that drink and drugs are a larger problem than speed?
The answer lies in the reports of the International Transport Forum, which collates road safety data. The latest New Zealand “country profile”, published last year with data from 2021, says, “alcohol and/or drugs were a contributing factor in 113 fatal crashes (40%)”.
The same report says “speeding contributed to 109 fatal crashes (38%)”. (The number of deaths that year was 318, which is higher than these numbers suggest because some crashes involved multiple fatalities).
All this means there’s no statistical difference: they’re both critical.
With Cabinet authorisation, the minister signed the new Rule for the Setting of Speed Limits into law on September 28. This rule reverses all the lower speed limits introduced under the previous Government’s speed rule, adopted in 2022.
The higher limits will come into force on or before July 1, 2025, while new limits around schools will kick in a year later, on or before July 1, 2026.
Transport Minister Simeon Brown. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Using the Official Information Act, the Herald has been asking the minister, MoT and NZTA for documents relating to the new speed rule since it was first announced in draft form in June, and has met delays at almost every point.
The Cabinet papers were released by MoT in October. Before that, the Herald had been repeatedly advised that other material, such as communications among the relevant agencies and the minister’s office, “does not exist”.
But one of the Cabinet papers stated: “The following departments were consulted on the development of this paper: the New Zealand Transport Agency, New Zealand Police, Accident Compensation Corporation, Department of Internal Affairs, and the Ministry of Education. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet were informed.”
We asked the minister’s office about the emails, reports, minutes and other material related to this consultation. Why was the Herald told it “does not exist”?
We were then advised that several email trails and 300 pages of additional information had been identified as relevant and would be assessed for release. We will report on this material when it’s available.
In the interim, NZTA told us that although it did not provide any formal advice directly to the minister, it did write two letters to MoT. Those letters, from July, were made public last Friday. They appear to address the minister, as if written for him to see.
In one, the director of land transport, Brent Alderton, wrote: “There is well-founded evidence, nationally and internationally, that establishes the link between vehicle speed and the likelihood of a crash occurring, as well as the severity and consequences of any crash.”
He “encouraged” Brown to “use ... the available evidence”, and also noted there would be extra, unbudgeted costs in reversing the speed rule.
In the other letter, the group general manager of transport services, Brett Gliddon, provided a tightly written five-page letter with 27 recommendations. Most appear to have been ignored.
We asked the minister if he had seen these letters. He declined to answer.
The minister’s checklist
The Minister of Transport has some statutory duties when introducing a new speed rule. The ministry wrote to Brown on September 25 spelling out what they were.
This “cover briefing” includes the final version of the rule, as approved by Cabinet, a helpful yes/no checklist and some key information relevant to each item on that checklist.
On September 28, Brown circled “yes” against every item on the checklist and signed it. That same day he promulgated the new rule.
Checklist from the Ministry of Transport, marked up and signed by Transport Minister Simeon Brown, recording that he has paid “due regard” to safety and other matters before approving the new speed rule.
The minister confirmed he considered safety and every other matter as required before signing the rule. They included:
Maintaining and improving safety
The ministry quoted from a meta-analysis in 2009 which found “every 1% increase in mean speed results in a 4% increase in the risk of a fatal crash and a 2% increase in the risk of serious crashes”.
And: “The risk to pedestrians also increases with increased speed. Studies show that the risk of death is about four to five times higher in collisions between a car and a pedestrian at 50km/h compared to the same type of collisions at 30km/h.”
Appropriate management of the roads
“The rule ... may result in wider engineering changes to accommodate new speed limits,” said MoT.
This means rural roads, for example, may require wider shoulders, median barriers, better surfaces, safer corners and intersections and the like. The minister would not say if there was any extra funding for this.
Many rural roads had their speed limits lowered to 80km/h or less after 2022 because NZTA believed they were unsafe at 100km/h.
They didn’t make it up. About 30% of our driving (measured in distances travelled) is on two-lane rural roads, but as the ITF report says, those roads account for 68% of fatalities.
You might say that by a country mile, rural roads are our most dangerous roads.
Yet Cabinet was told there is “not public acceptance of the reduced speed limit” on those roads, so agreed to raise the limit back to 100km/h.
Was the Cabinet aware of the dangers of rural roads? The minister declined to say.
Speed limits of 80km/h will be a thing of the past on rural roads from July 1 next year. But will the roads be any safer? Photo / Peter de Graaf
Economic development
MoT said: “Where ... there is an increase in the seriousness of any crashes, we would expect the costs to the economy also increase.”
This is a reference to first responder costs, healthcare, road maintenance, time off work and all the other things that make up the “total social cost of road crashes”.
For 2021, the ITF report put that cost at $9.77 billion, or 3% of GDP.
Cabinet was not provided with this figure.
MoT said higher speed limits will reduce travel times “in some circumstances”, particularly “on long, uninterrupted stretches of road with low congestion, such as on state highways”.
But it expected they would be “less noticeable in urban areas where there is congestion, traffic signals, vulnerable users sharing the road, and other factors”.
That is, if you’re stuck in traffic in Auckland, a higher speed limit will not help.
Cabinet was not told this, either. Brown told his colleagues: “Reversing speed limits would likely result in reduced travel times on roads where speed limits are reversed.”
As mentioned above, no evidence has been released by Cabinet that the Government has any analysis at all of the overall economic consequences of higher speed limits.
Environmental sustainability and public health
MoT noted that higher speeds on open roads will probably increase greenhouse gas emissions, while a failure to deal with congestion will not lower emissions on clogged-up roads.
Public health was not on the checklist, but it is a statutory matter the minister must consider and MoT summarised it for him anyway.
One issue it raised was air pollution, which the Ministry for the Environment says kills 3300 people each year.
That’s 10 times more than crashes on the roads and two-thirds of those deaths are thought to be caused primarily by motor-vehicle emissions.
MoT also noted the public health system would be impacted by any rise in the number and severity of crashes.
The cost of implementing the new rule
MoT advised Cabinet that councils would probably have to spend ratepayers’ money they had not budgeted for. Several councils had objected to this and some submitted that it “does not align with the value for money or efficiency values” set out in the minister’s own Government Policy Statement on Land Transport published in June.
What the Cabinet papers also reveal
The Cabinet papers and NZTA letters tell us more about the process of setting the new speed rule.
Saying no to ‘snail’s pace’ driving
The select committee considering the new rule earlier this year received 138 submissions from councils, schools and other groups. Most were opposed to the higher limits.
But there were also 8000 individual submissions from the public, with two-thirds supporting the higher limits.
Brown may have had some small hand in that. On July 7 he wrote to National Party supporters urging them to submit. “Kiwis rejected Labour’s blanket speed limit reductions,” he said, “which were forcing motorists to drive at a snail’s pace.”
Why 120km/h for new motorways?
The new rule allows for a speed limit of 120km/h “on roads that are built and maintained to a standard to safely support this speed”.
But NZTA advised MoT that “there aren’t any” such roads in New Zealand. And, it said, “the cost to upgrade or build for 120km/h is likely to be considerable”.
This advice was not included in the Cabinet papers.
The minister has said: “We’re giving the green light for new expressways to have speed limits up to 120km/h where it’s safe, from the day they open.”
The Herald asked Brown if Cabinet knew this would “considerably” increase the cost of building and maintaining those roads. He declined to answer.
The new school rule
The new rule for schools introduces a “variable” speed limit, to apply on a short stretch of road outside school gates, for a short time at the start and end of the school day.
Will the new school rule provide enough protection for children?
This was opposed by many of the schools that made public submissions. They wanted permanent lower speed limits over a larger area, to provide better protection for children near schools at any time.
Their concerns were not included in the documents released by Cabinet.
NZTA’s Gliddon made several recommendations about the school rule, mainly seeking a compromise between the old and the new. His suggestions were not accepted.
The minister told us the school rule is “balanced” because it addresses the key times when MoT says most serious crashes occur, “but doesn’t inconvenience motorists at other times”.
What if a community wants lower speed limits?
All the existing lower speed limits must revert to their previous higher level by July 1 next year.
Any councils wanting to re-establish a lower limit must do a cost-benefit analysis for each street in the affected area. Safety impacts, travel-time impacts and implementation costs must all be quantified and included in the public consultation material.
We asked the minister if Cabinet had considered adopting the same process – quantifying the costs and benefits – before deciding to raise the speed limits.
He declined to answer.
Transport Minister Simeon Brown barges on with the increase of speed limits despite warnings from transport authorities and others. Illustration / Rod Emmerson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
