"Every student who’s able to independently get to school without a car trip is a win for our community." Photo / Martin Sykes
"Every student who’s able to independently get to school without a car trip is a win for our community." Photo / Martin Sykes
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Freemans Bay School is a mid-decile school with a roll of about 550. Although it’s a suburban school, there’s a motorway on-ramp 100m up the road.
Many of the children come not from the suburb, but from the largest concentration of residential dwellings in the country: theapartment blocks on and around Hobson and Nelson streets, right next door in the central city.
Hobson and Nelson are also motorway ramps. This means there is no safe walking route from the city to the school and almost all the children are accompanied, every day, by a parent or other caregiver, and must cross a complex and dangerous mess of streets.
It’s a relic of an old way of thinking about roads: that their only function is to be driven on, the faster the better.
Currently, Freemans Bay itself, home to most of the children, is a safe speed zone with a 30km/h speed limit over the whole suburb. That happened after a campaign led by the school, with strong community support.
From July 1 this year or possibly sooner, the limit around the school and on many other nearby streets will revert to 50km/h, except for a very short period of time at the start and end of the school day, on two very short stretches of road right outside the school. At those times and places, a 30km/h limit will apply.
This is happening because of the new Speed Rule promulgated by the Government last year.
Cindy Walsh, the principal at Freemans Bay, has written to the Minister of Transport, Chris Bishop, to “implore” him to rethink that rule. She says the safe speed zone has led to “an increase in our students walking, cycling and wheeling to school”.
In addition to the obvious safety issue, she told the minister, “Every student who’s able to independently get to school without a car trip is a win for our community. This reduces congestion in our neighbourhood and around the school, contributes to improved air quality and saves precious hours of productive time for parents and caregivers every day. It also gives children a healthy and happy start to the day.”
It gets worse. The school is in the eastern half of the suburb but in the other half, from Franklin Rd west, the 30km/h safe speed zone will remain.
Marie Guerreiro from the lobby group All Aboard says this means “drivers coming from neighbouring 30km/h zones will be encouraged to speed up to 50km/h as they approach the school. They will then encounter a very short stretch of 30km/h at the school gate, but only for brief periods on weekdays.”
It’s confusing and an invitation to drive badly.
Freemans Bay School is not alone. Higher speed limits are being introduced nationwide and in Auckland alone this will affect 155 schools.
In Avondale, there’s a school precinct that includes Rosebank School, Avondale Intermediate, a kindergarten and the third-largest school in the country – Avondale College. But despite the thousands of children who walk and ride there every day, the 30km/h limit in the area will disappear, except for the few minutes at the start and end of the school day, right outside the schools.
At Balmoral School, set between two side streets just off the very busy Dominion Rd, they’ve been working with police and Auckland Transport to control the traffic outside the school. As Kyle MacDonald from the school board said recently in a letter to the local board, they want more help to do this.
But they’re getting a higher speed limit. “There is no doubt,” he wrote, that reverting to a higher speed limit “will only make this job harder”.
Blockhouse Bay School principal Neil Robinson points out that “kids will behave unpredictably at times - they get distracted, talking to each other”. He calls the current lower speeds in school neighbourhoods “common sense” and says he can’t understand why they will be raised.
Transport Minister Chris Bishop, who has not abandoned the new Speed Rule introduced by his predecessor Simeon Brown. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Over a lengthy period from 2020, Auckland Transport has been through extensive community consultations about ways to make our streets safer for all users. One of the outcomes is that from 2022 lower speed limits have been applied to 1800 streets. Nearly all of them – 1760 – are near schools.
Has it been worth it? You bet. Since 2022, AT reports, there have been 30% fewer deaths and serious injuries on the streets with lower speed limits, compared with a 9% rise over the same period on other streets. That’s about 80 fewer people killed or badly hurt.
It’s incontrovertible evidence of success.
Road-controlling authorities in other parts of the country have done similar things, although none as extensively as AT. None of them adopted a “blanket” approach to reducing speed limits, as Bishop and his predecessor Simeon Brown have both repeatedly claimed. The law didn’t allow that. It’s been specific, targeted, and done with community support.
One of the features of the safer streets initiative was to recognise that around schools, the danger zone isn’t just outside the school gates. Most children live further away than that. So the lower speed limits apply more widely in the neighbourhood.
It also recognised that the danger time is all the time. This is because children can be out and about at many different times, and schools themselves play host to a whole range of activities, like sports training, outside school hours.
Research for AT by the transport consultancy Flow found that 85% of deaths and serious injuries within 400m of a school gate occur outside the start and end of the school day.
So the lower speeds apply 24/7. The message was simple: there’s a school nearby, so please slow down.
Now all that is disappearing. Last year, Brown’s new Speed Rule introduced a blanket reversal of all the lower speed limits of the previous few years. Without consultation, whole neighbourhoods are getting higher limits. They’ll kick in by July 1 this year.
Minister Bishop has, to date, shown no sign he might rethink the substance of the Speed Rule, especially as it applies to urban areas. But he has allowed the NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi to consider public feedback on speed limit proposals on 49 sections of state highway.
Caroline Perry of the road safety charity Brake calls that a “sensible decision”.
This is important because when Cabinet decided to reverse the lower speed limits, it said it was listening to rural drivers who said they should be able to go faster. But rural roads have a much higher crash rate than urban roads and drivers in a hurry don’t speak for everyone.
In Turangi, for example, there’s been a big campaign to keep the 60km/h limit on the 2km of state highway that runs through the town, rather than have it revert to 80km/h.
How hard should it be for kids to get to school? Photo / Branislav Novak/Getty Images/EyeEm
“The logical next step,” says Perry, “is to grant the same opportunity in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, before imposing widespread speed increases across our communities and around our schools.”
Bishop has not granted that opportunity to schools or other urban communities.
In response to all this, a coalition of road safety groups, operating under the umbrella name Movement, has sought a judicial review of the new Speed Rule. This will be heard in May.
In the meantime, Movement’s appeal for an injunction to prevent further progress with the rule will be heard in the High Court in Wellington today.
A few myths about speed and safety
People don’t want lower speeds
Ask people if they want to drive faster and they might well say yes.
But it’s different when you ask if the speed limit should be low on these streets near this school. AT’s consultation showed 86% public support for safe speeds around schools and 78% support from school leaders for 24/7 safe speed zones.
30km/h is too slow
Austroads, the peak body for Australian and New Zealand roading authorities, reports that a person struck by a vehicle travelling 30km/h has a 90% chance of surviving.
At 50km/h, that drops to 20%. For children, it’s even lower.
Using the Official Information Act, I’ve read all the material presented to Cabinet to support the new Speed Rule and it contains no evidence to support the claim. Nor has any such evidence been presented to the public.
On the other hand, research by WSP in 2024 found that “crash cost savings generally outweigh the travel time disbenefits by a factor of 2 to 10 (or more)”.
Every you think you might save by driving faster will cost all of us $2-$10.
Besides, says AT, the safer-speeds programme it is now required to abandon adds only 15 seconds to a 20-minute car trip.
Flow estimates that over 10 years in Auckland, permanent 30km/h limits for a kilometre around all schools would save 468 deaths and serious injuries and have a benefit:cost ratio of 7.0.
At heart, this isn’t an argument about data and road safety shouldn’t be a weapon in the culture wars. It’s real.
“Last year,” says Cindy Walsh from Freemans Bay School, “I was witness to one of our students being struck by a car outside the school, outside of drop-off and pick-up times. The car was travelling at the required speed limit of 30km/h.
“The student was taken to hospital with moderate injuries and shock and was discharged the day after. If the car was travelling at 50km/h he would have received serious injury or even death.”
We shouldn’t be arguing about whether we have a “right” to drive faster. We should be working out how to make the streets safe for children to walk and ride to school. Fundamentally, that’s what today’s injunction is about.
