Peter Williams: Speed limits to reduce

Stand-by to move slowly on empty open roads

Sometimes I wonder if politicians just want to really, really piss us off.

How else could you explain some crazy scheme which we in the south might have to put with about how fast we can drive? Not far from where I live, the Queenstown Lakes Council want to slow Wanaka right down. At the moment the speed limit in town is already just 40kph . Now there are plans to reduce that 30kph or lower.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Waka Kotahi's proposal to drop speed limits isn't evidenced-based

 

What really frustrates me about this debate about dropping the speed limits is that it’s not evidence-based.

This proposal doesn’t seem to be based on facts.

People have just accepted the argument at face value without looking a little deeper and asking: will dropping speed limits on 500 kilometres-worth of roading in this country really help us get road deaths down significantly?  Will it really help us get road deaths down to zero? 

So let’s look at the facts.

Mike Hosking: Road to Zero is a wasteful failure

What are the Government going to do when this year turns out to be one of the deadliest on the roads in years?

That is the way we are tracking, this past weekend it stood at 307 deaths.

Leaked material from Waka Kotahi suggested they had mapped the country for problem roads and turns out just about every road is a problem road. So they are suggesting they drop the speed limit to 80 kilometres per hour.