Be a road safety hero is the theme of Road Safety Week starting today (12 – 16 May).
City Vision recognises and supports everyone who helps make our roads safer and those who provide the essential assistance after a crash.
It is alarming that Auckland Transport is stepping away from its award-winning evidence- backed road safety programme just as that deaths and serious injuries are rising on Auckland’s roads.
Auckland Transport is moving fast, as a result of the government’s new speed rule, to remove Auckland’s safe speed zones by 1 July. These zones covering quiet residential streets around schools like Pt Chev, Waterview, Wesley, Freemans Bay, Epsom and Ponsonby are working to reduce harm and encourage more children to walk, scoot and cycle to school.
Public support for the safe speed zones can not be taken into account and the current rule doesn’t allow for future consultation on 30kmh streets even though this is the safe operating speed for many of our quiet residential streets. A common-sense correction to the speed rule by the Minister of Transport is urgently needed.
City Vision has therefore joined the fight to SAVE OUR SAFE STREETS.
We are calling on the Minister of Transport to let Auckland retain our safe speed zones. (addresses and suggestions for a letter to the Minister and local leaders from Bike Auckland and Grey Lynn 2030)
The Chair of AT has confirmed he has written to the Minister as has Cr Andy Baker, Chair of council’s Transport, Resilience and Infrastructure Committee. Incredibly C&R blocked the Waitematā, Albert Eden and Puketāpapa Local Boards from writing to the Minister in a complete dereliction of their role to support the local community.
Here Local Board member Christina Robertson explains what happened at the Albert-Eden Local Board meeting in March in response to her Notice of Motion resolving to write to the Transport Minister, Chris Bishop, that the local board opposes the blanket speed increases that the 2024 speed rule forces on us, and on councils around the country. (It follows on from Richard Northey’s Notice of Motion at the Waitemata Local Board meeting the week before)
Cr Andy Baker, the chair of the Transport, Resilience and Infrastructure Committee, had said this was a matter for local boards, not for Governing Body; I wanted us to use our voice to advocate for the best interests of our community.
My motion was voted down on the C&R chair’s casting vote, and the chair also used her casting vote to defeat a second attempt to at least resolve to write to the Minister asking him to consider the evidence and community support for safer speeds.
We had dozens of people write to us, letters from four schools from across the local board area, and seven public forum presenters speaking for safe speeds. None of that mattered. The chair told the attendees that they were a small segment of the community, and that there was a ‘range of views’ and she had to make decisions for the whole of the community. To me, if there’s a range of views, good governance means considering those views, testing them against the evidence, and making the decision with the widest benefit. C&R instead chose to dismiss the views that they disagreed with.
The public forum presenters spoke powerfully of the evidence for safer speeds, of the success of safer speed zones around Auckland, and of their fears of the consequences of forcing residential streets back to unsurvivable speed limits.
Here’s my own speech from the debate:
“I live around the corner from Balmoral School. I thought I’d start with what I see on from my study on a day I’m working at home. Most days that’s elderly couples on their daily walk, neighbours walking dogs, joggers and power walkers, teenagers in MAGS uniforms walking home from the bus, people biking to and from work or shopping—and I don’t just mean me and my dad, by the way. There’s my neighbour who walks his little girls to and from Balmoral School, rain or shine. He’s got three, and his youngest has just started school.
When I head in to work, I’ve often seen Balmoral students doing bike skills classes on Camborne Road. It beggars belief that anyone thinks those kids should be exposed to cars going 50km/hr.
The laws of physics are unforgiving. Every 1% increase in speed has a roughly 4% increase in fatalities–and because I’m still a research nerd at heart, I’m happy to get you citations for that.
Safer speeds work, we’ve heard that. A resident who got in touch from Bellevue Road called it a ‘breath of fresh air’. On my street, it felt like a relief. Everyone who lives here drives sensibly because they know the street, but before the 30 sign went up, there was always a little part of my mind that was on edge for the people who don’t know the street and would try to drive like it’s Sandringham Road. That doesn’t happen now.
I saw yesterday on Facebook that a MAGS student was hit. He walked away, but at 50km/hr there’s a 90% chance he wouldn’t have. And that’s a street that is going back to 50km/hr, not in spite of the school and the numbers of students walking around there, but because of it. It’s unbelievable—it’s unconscionable.
They work, and that’s backed up by research. Engineering measures have an effect, speed limit signs have an effect, both together are more effective than either alone. I’ve got citations for that too. [link]
The first tranche of Auckland Transport’s safe speeds programme showed a 38.8% reduction in fatalities, and an 11.8% reduction in deaths and serious injuries.
The second tranche, which included most of the changes in our area, showed a 41% reduction in fatalities, and an overall 13% reduction in deaths and serious injuries.
When I was preparing this motion, I took a look back before my time on the board, to when the Sandringham quiet zones were implemented in 2014. People really embraced the idea of the quiet zones, and a strong theme in the feedback report was ‘Yes please, but can we also have speed limits to match?’ In 2021, we finally got them, and the feedback then, for Sandringham and across our local board area, was strongly supportive. And people are here today to stand up to keep them, and to ask us to stand with them.
This shouldn’t be a partisan thing, or a subdivision thing—we’ve had residents from all over the area asking us to stand up for safety.
Even Desley Simpson posted a couple of weeks ago advising people to email Chris Bishop.
National campaigned in 2023 on reversing speed limit changes where safe, and I’ve heard a lot of surprise that it’s being done without consultation and without safety assessments—though with plenty of advice from the Ministry about the dangers of increasing speeds. And for what benefit? A few seconds of travel time, and some assertions about productivity. I did an OIA last year to try and find out what the previous minister was basing that on, and so did the Herald, and neither of us managed to get an answer. But we know deaths and serious injuries come at a cost in time and productivity—and more importantly, in pain and loss.
I was at an Uptown Business Association meeting on Tuesday. They’re really concerned that the streets around Maungawhau Station, which they’re counting on to bring new people to invigorate the area, will have to have 50km/hr limits. They know it will make it less attractive for people to explore around the station, and they also don’t want to contemplate the thought of people getting hurt.
The Rule allows children a modicum of safety for short periods in the morning and afternoon, and only for a few hundred metres around the school gate. I’ve heard from school leaders, and I know from observation, that that’s not enough. Students move around at all times of the day-–they have class trips, they have clubs, they stay after school to play with friends, not to mention other groups that use school premises. That’s why 78% of school leaders supported permanent speed limits around schools in the consultation last year. And not for nothing, school kids’ families and neighbours deserve safe streets too.
The previous minister put ideology ahead of safety and community. The new Minister has shown that he’s open to listening to evidence and to local communities by relaxing the speed rule for some roads that are controlled by Waka Kotahi NZTA. That’s what we’re asking for: the power to take community support into account. We need to stand up for our communities to get the same consideration.
Last year I compared safe speeds to seatbelts. Seatbelts reduce the impact of a crash for people inside a car, and safe speeds reduce the impact for people outside cars. Even better, they reduce the chance of a crash happening at all: we’re humans with human reaction times, and even Usain Bolt can’t go 50km/hr under his own steam. 30km/hr gives us that split second more time to react.
I suspect everyone here would be pretty ropeable if the Minister of Transport not only told them they weren’t allowed to buy a new car with seatbelts, but came around with scissors to take our existing seatbelts away. That’s what this rule is doing to our streets.
To everyone who took time out of their day and came today, and who’s taken the time to contact us with your stories and to remind us of the evidence, thank you. We’ve heard from engineers, doctors, school leaders, and everyday residents who love the calmer, friendlier streets. We’ve heard from parents and from older people. We’ve heard from people who walk, bike and drive. Our streets work. I’ll keep fighting for them, and I hope you’ll fight with me.”