The Slowdown: Lower speed limits, upgrades for 30 per cent of highways

Lower speed limits and safety improvements are on the way for up to 30 per cent of New Zealand’s state highways in the next few years to combat our high road toll.

Last year 377 people died in road crashes - more than the annual totals for the previous three years and close to the 378 road deaths in 2017 and 2018, the worst years in recent memory.

Reviews by New Zealand’s transport agency, Waka Kotahi, show more than 85 per cent of the country’s roads have a speed limit higher than what it calls the “safe and appropriate speed”.

In response, the agency is prioritising lower speed limits, along with other safety improvements. It began in November with an Interim State Highway Speed Management Plan 2023-2024, that included proposed speed limit changes to 3.2 per cent of our state highway network, as well as schools, marae and other urban areas.

The proposals are part of national strategy to reduce road deaths. Photo / NZME

A Herald data analysis (see further down this story for full details) shows the most common effective speed reduction compared to current average driving speeds under this plan would be 5km/h.

Waka Kotahi’s full 2024-27 State Highway Speed Management Plan, expected to be released for public consultation in June, is likely to contain far more extensive changes, including speed limit changes and safety improvements affecting around 20-30 per cent of state highways in the next five years.

By 2030, the agency hopes to improve the safety of 40 per cent of the country’s highways through lower speed limits or road safety improvements.

The 40 per cent of state highways (marked in blue on the map below) have been identified as having a high safety benefit on Waka Kotahi’s internal database, Mega Maps, which is also used for councils to assess speed limits and safety improvements on local roads.

Waka Kotahi’s interim plan includes speed limit changes to 350km of New Zealand’s 11,000km state highway network identified as high risk.

The Herald’s analysis shows these roads have been associated with 279 fatal and serious crashes since 2017.

The crashes per kilometre on these roads are about double the national average per kilometre on state highways.

Last year, 5.7 per cent of state highway crash deaths happened on the roads covered by the interim plan - a similar rate to previous years - even though the roads make up only 3.2 per cent of the whole network.

The interim plan also includes proposed speed limit changes to several hundred schools, marae, and other urban locations.

The majority of the roads affected by the interim plan are in Waikato and Wellington regions. Waka Kotahi’s Road to Zero portfolio manager, Tara Macmillan, said next year’s plan will be bigger in scale and integrate infrastructure improvements, particularly safety cameras.

Macmillan said the agency was taking a balanced approach and in some cases, may propose dropping a speed limit from 100km to 90km, instead of 80km, while stakeholders adjusted.

If infrastructure, such as physical separation of the road through barriers could be installed, that speed limit could potentially be moved back to 100km per hour.

A Herald data analysis (see chart below) shows many of the lower speed limits in the interim plan would have little impact on drivers travelling at the average current speed, which is below the proposed new limit. Of the 138km where the proposed limit is lower than the average current driving speed, the most common speed reduction would be 5km/h on 34km of the affected state highways.

Drivers would have to reduce speed by 10km/h or more than the current average speed on 25km of the roads involved.

Transport Minister Michael Wood said setting optimum speed limits had the potential to reduce deaths and serious injury road crashes and crash costs substantially.

“Given that 320 people died on our roads last year at a much higher rate than comparable countries, the previous approach has not been working and things need to change.”

In a recent report, Waka Kotahi’s director of land transport Kane Patena said New Zealand had lost more people to traffic deaths per capita than most other countries in the OECD.

In 2019, we were in the bottom six of 36 countries, which Patena described as “unacceptable”.

Only 15 per cent of our speed limits were “safe and appropriate” and fixing this would save lives, he said.

In our crash fatality statistics, men and Māori are overrepresented. Waka Kotahi’s Māori road safety outcomes report, published in June 2021, said deaths and serious injuries from road crashes had risen since 2013, but these rates for Māori had increased faster than non-Māori between 2014-2017.

Overall, road traffic mortality rates are estimated at between 60 per cent and 200 per cent higher for Māori compared to non-Māori.

A Herald analysis of Government road fatality data showed men were more than three times as likely to die in a crash than women.

Superintendent Steve Greally, the director of the National Road Policing Centre, described the human cost of the road toll as horrific.

“Every time someone dies on our roads it’s our people that go and mop it up.

“I say mop it up, and that’s a horrible thing to have to say, but the reality is, they are mopping it up. It’s a mess. It’s so horrific for our people to see it.”

Officials hope new legislation dictating how speed limits are set, which came into effect in May last year will help.

A Government report in April 2021 noted that the previous process was costly and inefficient and had led to poorly coordinated speed limit changes across the network that often lack infrastructure changes.