Call it age, experience or maturity, but I find myself less annoyed by queues of urban traffic moving at a snail’s pace than I used to. The typical urban speed limit of 50kph means little when the maximum you can move is 10-20kph and often there’s very little you can do, or other routes you can take, to quicken the journey. C’est la vie… Why be frustrated?

It’s at this point I can hear certain factions quip: “If everyone rode public transport, utilised the cycling lanes, their two feet, or a combination thereof, creeping along in traffic wouldn’t be a problem.”

Well, that’s a debate we’ve had over and over, and today I’d like to focus on another hot topic of urban mobility – the push to reduce urban speed limits. This is a reality in may major cities the world over and New Zealand is no exception. There’s been plenty of talk about it over the past few years and a recent opinion piece on Newsroom once again raised the debate in my own mind.

The writher, Timothy Welch, looks at Wellington City Council’s plan to reduce speeds across the city, which was passed mid-September, and posits that just a small impact on travel times will result. Reducing speeds from 50kph to 30kph adds just 48 seconds of travel time per kilometre, he suggests.

And he makes a fair point, slowing down means more time to scan the road and react to the prevailing situation, and less time and space needed to bring the vehicle to a stop when it counts most. What’s a few minutes per journey if you’ve managed to avoid a collision and possibly save a life? And would you even notice it when driving that speed in traffic anyway?

Wellington at least hasn’t gone entirely crazy with its speed reduction proposal, unlike Auckland – the City of Sails soon to become the City of Snails (yes, I’m sure I’m not the only one to have come up with that little gem) as certain 100kph roads are to be reduced to as low as 40kph, and some 50kph roads down to an almost-stationary 10kph.

Granted, the speeds only go that low on certain roads, which are short and in busy areas. Nevertheless, let’s be realistic – 10kph is ideal when you’re looking for parking, but on the public road it’s borderline ridiculous.

Whether 10, 20 or 30kph, I’m not convinced there will be full adherence to these revised speed limits. Nor do I believe this is the best approach to making roads safer. Would it not be better to implement more reasonable reductions – say by 10 to 20kph – along with wider-reaching initiatives? A smaller speed reduction should surely be less likely to raise the ire of motorists and more likely to achieve higher levels of compliance. Combine these with speed-limiting infrastructure, speed bumps for example. And throw in increased police monitoring and harsher penalties for those found to have transgressed – whether exceeding the speed limit or, say, driving under the influence or using a mobile phone.

The same, by the way, could be said for pedestrians who walk around staring into their screens instead of being aware of what’s going on around them. If we want to make cities more pedestrian-friendly, then we all need to share the responsibility…

While perhaps you’d have a harder time arguing against it in an urban environment, much like the debate around lowering speed limits on the country’s state highways an extreme approach to cutting speed limits in cities won’t be the silver bullet to reducing road fatalities. And as with many similar initiatives of late, I await the ‘results’ a year or so down the line.

All the best,

Gavin Myers
Editor