Charlie Mitchell, reporting in a fantastic feature piece for the Press:
The Government's answer was Road to Zero, launched in 2019 and rolled out the following year. Unlike earlier strategies, it embraced the Vision Zero premise outright: that road deaths should be treated as preventable failures of the system, not managed downward as a cost of doing business.
I devoured this piece. It’s fantastic. Go, read it.
It precisely details how road deaths are not accidents: they’re the inevitable result of a badly designed system that kills and maims hundreds of New Zealanders every single year. Our roads kill us because they’re designed to.
Take one example mentioned by Mitchell, when State Highway 6 lowered speed limits on nine sections and increased speed limits on two sections.
The findings, when they arrived, were striking.
On SH6, deaths and serious-injury crashes fell by 84%. Every road with a lower speed limit recorded fewer serious crashes.
Both roads where limits increased recorded more.
Higher speed limits kill more people. Our highways are designed to encourage lethal speeds.
This insanity is not an inevitability: smarter countries than ours are solving the devastating problem of people killed by roads.
We started to face the challenge of road deaths in 2019 with Road to Zero. That programme was cancelled, thanks to…
Simeon Brown, speaking as National’s Transport spokesperson in 2023:
A National government will undo Labour’s blanket speed limit reductions, returning many state highways to 100 km/h from 80, and many local roads to 50 km/h from 30, while designing new highways for 110 km/h, National’s Transport spokesperson Simeon Brown says.
“Under the guise of safety, Labour has exposed its anti-car ideology by slowing down New Zealanders going about their daily lives.
Simeon Brown and his party decided to make safety measures on our roads politically toxic.
With a culture-war stoking temperament, Simeon Brown appears hostile to anyone not in a compensatory suburban Hilux and desperate to drive faster whatever the cost.
He actively chose to increase the speed limits around schools, all but guaranteeing that more young families will endure their children being killed by unsafe roads after class.
Mitchell extensively covers the public’s support for vandalising speed cameras or dangerously hooning along highways. There is an undercurrent of hostility amongst some to the minor personal inconveniences of safer roads.
But I think it’s worth naming the politician who signed off on politicising road safety: Simeon Brown.
