Third phase of safer speeds aims to cut road deaths.
Memo to all drivers vaguely – or even markedly – irritated by the raft of reduced speed limits being introduced around Auckland: you are playing a significant role in lowering road deaths, serious injuries and making roads safer.
This is underlined by evaluation research on the two year results of the first phase of safe speed limits – aimed at showing the difference in deaths and serious injuries after safer speed limits have been applied, many around schools, rural and urban roads.
The statistics show that road deaths have fallen by 30 per cent in the areas covered by Phase 1. In comparison, road deaths in Auckland areas with unchanged speed limits have gone up by nine per cent. “That is a difference of 39 per cent,” says Auckland Transport’s Safety Technical Lead Ping Sim, “a hard, fast fact which cannot be ignored.”
At 50km/hr, she says, a person walking or biking has an 80 per cent chance of death if struck by a car. At 40km/hr, that risk drops to 30 per cent and, at the mandated 30km/hr level, the risk of dying drops to 10 per cent.
AT began Phase 3 of the speed limit reduction programme on December 1 – and will see a grand total of 3143 roads with safer speeds across all three phases. Phase 3 involves 1636 roads, about half the total, including 980 roads within school zones where the speed limit is being reduced from 50km/hr to 30km/hr.
“If you extrapolate the death and injury reductions from Phase 1 out over the next 10 years, we estimate that this speed reduction will save about 200 lives and many more serious injuries,” Sim says. “It’s such a no-brainer – and we know from our research that almost two in three Aucklanders support a 3-5 minutes increase in their travel time if it helps improve safety.”
“That’s especially because they’ve seen how little it affects their daily lives,” she says. “In a school zone, the reduced speed limit adds less than 15 seconds to a typical car trip of 20 minutes. In fact, pretty much all travel times are hardly affected to the extent people think.”
Sim says the major reason for delays are waiting at intersections, waiting for lights to change or being caught behind a car turning out of a busy lane: “That’s what cuts into the time; but with slower speed limits, it’s a smoother flow.”
Sim says there are almost 30 per cent who do not yet support the change. Most “don’t yet connect the link between speed and deaths and injuries on our roads. Some say they believe the economy could be harmed and others fear they are slowly being ‘pushed out of their cars’.
“The reality,” says Sim,”is that the economic case depends on the reliability of the road network – that’s the research feedback from our freight road users and professional drivers. They need to have reliable travel times – that’s what affects productivity and economic value. Safer speeds mean fewer deaths, injuries and crashes – and create a more reliable road network.”
Another factor in the decision to lower speed limits is that current limits often do not reflect the type of roads in some areas in some areas, particularly rural, but also some urban areas – Waiheke being a good example.
“The Waiheke population has been asking us to drop the 100km/hr speed limit, saying that speed, for the type of roads they have, doesn’t make sense to them,” says Sim, adding that Waiheke has a lot of hilly, narrow, unsealed roads not safe to drive on at 100km/hr. Those limits have been lowered as part of Phase 3.
“Many of our speed limits were arbitrarily imposed,” says Sim, “and used guidelines from Mother England, many of which dated back to the 1930s. Now we have the research and science that speed impacts the severity and outcome of the crash – and we have to act on the science.”
Other key statistical factors in the decision to reduce speed limits include:
· Evidence shows speed is a factor in more than 70 per cent of injury crashes in New Zealand. Safe speed limits save lives.
· 30km/hr is the internationally accepted speed to greatly reduce the chances of people walking or cycling from being killed or seriously injured – translating to a 90 per cent chance of surviving the crash.
· New Zealand ranks poorly in road safety performance and is significantly worse than that of the world’s best-performing countries. Aotearoa New Zealand ranks 19th on an international scale measured on road fatalities per billion kilometres travelled – significantly behind Norway, Ireland, Denmark, the UK and many others, even the US.
· The value of statistical life was estimated at $4.42 million per fatality at June 2020 prices. Adding other social costs (medical care, legal and court, vehicle damage) gives an updated average social cost of $4.46m per fatality – a significant social cost from fatalities where speed has likely been a contributing factor.
“The point of all this is to save lives,” says Sim. “AT’s Vision Zero goal is to have no one die or be seriously injured on our roads by 2050 – and we have committed to that because we believe no one should run that risk of death just for travelling around Tamaki Makaurau Auckland roads.”
For more information: AT.govt.nz/safespeeds