If you can picture the Minister of Transport’s “astonished” face, that is what Simeon Brown was wearing after Auckland Council voted 18-3 to reject the government’s plan to wipe all speed limit reductions on the city’s roads since 2020.
The vote does not mean Auckland Council – or any other local authority – can actually change what’s coming. Consultation on the new Setting of Speed Limits 2024 Rule is merely that: consultation. Once it is in place, speed limits for most types of roads will increase and councils will be forbidden ever to reduce any of them, even at the request of local voters. The minister’s earlier promise that limits would increase only where it was “safe to do so” is undefined.
The new rule also wipes out lower speed zones around schools, replacing them with a “variable” system, in which schools are allowed safer speed zones only at the beginning and end of the school day. According to the road safety group Brake, 85% of serious crashes near schools happen outside these times.
There can be no doubt about the change Brown wants to see: he wants vehicles going as fast as possible at all times. The implications of such a shift were made uncomfortably clear last month when Auckland Transport (AT) announced it had revised upward its targets for reducing death and injury on the city’s roads. Key features of the Government Policy Statement on land transport – the new speed limit rule and a reduction in funding for “safety through speed and infrastructure improvements” – meant a redrawing of AT’s Statement of Intent, explained its chair, Richard Leggat. AT was now expecting 55 more road deaths in the next two years than it had previously.
In 2022, two years after an AA member survey found Auckland parents unwilling to let their children walk or cycle to school – leading the organisation to demand action on safety from AT – the agency conducted a benefit-cost ratio (BCR) analysis of its options around schools.
The option with by far the worst BCR, 0.2 (20 cents in economic benefit for every dollar spent), is the only one allowed by the minister’s new rule. The AT economists calculated that all other options – right up to imposing a 30km/h limit on all non-arterial local roads and some arterials – were cheaper to install than the variable speed zones.
They also delivered hundreds of millions more in benefits over a decade: lower vehicle operating costs, lower emissions and, most of all, lower “crash costs”, which include the economic cost of death and jury. (Real-world data comparing deaths and injuries on roads where speeds have been lower since 2020 to the rest of the network is limited so far, but basically supports the modelling.)
Brown’s minimal option would, on the other hand, save an average 14.2 seconds on journey times.
The minister has declared that raising speed limits around schools and busy local areas will deliver economic growth and increase productivity, but has yet to offer any analysis to back up this claim. He and Act leader David Seymour did issue a joint press statement last month in which Seymour decried councils’ ability to set lower speed limits as “depressing” and said it had “drained the joy from life” for drivers. Presumably a vibes-based analysis would show strong benefits.
The last government sometimes struggled to take the public along on its data journeys. Perhaps too much actuarial decision-making is the stuff of technocracy and sometimes politicians just have to do what they promised, however unevidenced, because it’s in the package people voted for. But to sit in Wellington and negate the ability of elected councils to respond to the needs of their communities without even trying to prove your case is not good democracy, either.
