Heather du Plessis-Allan: Waka Kotahi's proposal to drop speed limits is not evidenced-based

What really frustrates me about this debate about dropping the speed limits is that it’s not evidence-based.

This proposal doesn’t seem to be based on facts.

People have just accepted the argument at face value without looking a little deeper and asking: will dropping speed limits on 500 kilometres-worth of roading in this country really help us get road deaths down significantly?  Will it really help us get road deaths down to zero? 

So let’s look at the facts.

Only 15 percent of road deaths happen because of speed only.  Which means 85 percent of crashes happen below the speed limit or because the drivers are boozed or drugged up.   

85 percent.

So Waka Kotahi’s big solution to getting the road toll down completely ignores the fact that 85 percent of the road toll will probably be unaffected.

And as a justification for dropping speed limits, Waka Kotahi has drummed up a lot of publicity around our particularly bad road toll this year.

Come on. It’s pretty much on par with the last five years, and frankly in context, our road toll has been falling every single decade since the 70s.

Back in 1973, when we had a population of 3 million, the road toll was 843; more than double what it is now with almost half the population.

The worst thing about this is that it gives transport officials an excuse to not do the things that would actually make a difference.

They’re doing this so they don’t have to put in media barriers that would actually be effective at stopping cars crossing the centre line and smacking into other cars head on.

And that wouldn’t just stop head on crashes from speeding cars, but from everything else as well. Tired drivers, distracted drivers, drunk drivers, drugged drivers.

Logically, putting in a median barrier would probably save more lives than dropping a speed limit, but they don’t do that. They instead drop the speed limit so they can keep being lazy and not spending proper money on the roads.

What’s frustrating is that those facts are not what are being debated; instead, we’ve got an argument dictated by emotion.

Which means we’ll probably all end up having to drive more slowly, while hundreds of people still die on the roads each year because speed isn’t really the biggest problem.

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