Holding out for a Road Safety Hero

This is a guest post by Christina Robertson, who is a member of the Albert-Eden Local Board. The views presented here are her own. 

The header image shows an example of a short, dead-end street in the Albert-Eden area that is set to return to 50km/h as a result of AT’s unusually broad reading of the Speed Rule.

At the start of Road Safety Week 2025, it feels like a sick joke to see an email from Auckland Transport announcing the upcoming dates for their wholesale reversal of safe speeds across Auckland.

In stripping safe speed zones from over 150 schools and the neighbourhoods around them, AT backs away from all the evidence and throws the burden of road safety back on to vulnerable human beings. It’s shocking to see AT promoting Road Safety Week and the hard mahi of road safety heroes (as in this Instagram reel highlighting Gladstone Primary School’s walking school buses), all while making those heroes’ jobs harder.

The reversals, AT will tell you, are mandated by the 2024 Speed Rule. To be clear, the Speed Rule is indefensible–it’s bad policy, driven by cruel ideology, and it will do immense harm.

Editor’s note: see previous Greater Auckland coverage here, here, here, here and here.

But AT does have options. Because, as it happens, Hamilton City Council and Dunedin City Council took a very similar approach to Auckland’s in implementing safe speeds, and have been much more proactive in defending them. Along with most other urban centres, Hamilton and Dunedin have read the rule carefully to ensure they don’t go beyond its requirements. As a consequence, they’re raising speeds on far fewer roads: just six in Dunedin compared to Auckland’s rollback on over 1500 streets.

Why is this even happening?

The Speed Rule requires road-controlling authorities (councils, or, in Auckland’s case, AT) to raise speed limits which had been lowered since January 1, 2020. Perhaps its most damaging provision is to force RCAs to reverse safe speeds where the presence of a school is a ‘reason’ for the safe speed limit.

(Let us pause to contemplate what kind of logic leads to raising speeds to a limit that comes with a 90% risk of death not in spite of the presence of children, but because of it.)

Importantly, the Speed Rule doesn’t define a ‘reason’. It doesn’t, for example, say that a school was a ‘reason’ just because schools were discussed as part of a wider communications strategy, or whether schools (and the generally positive public attitude to keeping schoolchildren safe) were included in the broader contextual information provided.

After AT’s list of 1500 streets was released in March, I thought it was important to go back and read through the assessments of streets included in Tranche 2 of AT’s Safe Speeds Programme – not a small job. These assessments were developed to show AT staff’s reasoning in determining the most appropriate speed limit for the streets under consideration, and presented to AT board meetings in June and December 2021.

The programme was divided into a number of workstreams, under the headings ‘town centre’, ‘residential’, ‘schools’ and ‘complementary’. The definition of the ‘schools’ workstream was ‘roads that are directly next to a school or function with a high number of school-based movements’. (Emphasis added by me)

In AT’s own assessment documents, all local/residential streets come with a near-identical table of contextual information, including a reference to public support for safe speeds around schools as part of ‘the views of interested persons and groups’. The same wording was used not only for streets directly outside or near school gates, but also for streets that are a significant distance from a school, such as Wainoni Ave in Pt Chev (1km from Pt Chev School) and Cadman Ave in Waterview (1.7km from Waterview Primary School).

This alone makes clear that the presence of the word ‘school’ in copy-pasted contextual information is no indication that the school was a ‘reason’ under the meaning of the Rule.

Likewise, a communications strategy that mentions schools is also not a ‘reason’, since discussing in general terms the benefits of safe speeds near schools does not itself constitute the specific ‘reason[s]’ for a decision on a particular street. This is clear from a look at AT’s consultation materials from the Safe Speeds Programme (RIP). The consultation maps use the same text whether or not a street has a high number of school-based transport movements (see for example Cadman Ave, which is about 20 minutes’ walk for child-sized legs from the nearest school).

Yet AT has decided – without talking to local boards, stakeholders or residents about it – that if the word ‘school’ was used anywhere in the general vicinity, the speed limit has to go back up. (It’s the vibe, your honour.)

Reading through the street-by-street Tranche 2 assessments, I found more than 60 streets in Albert-Eden that are over 600m from the nearest school. That’s a ten-minute walk for a child; a reasonable walk, bike or scoot for kids who live there, but not a street any parent would use as a school drop-off point.

Remember, AT had defined its ‘schools’ workstream as being about streets that have a school or a high number of school-based movements (such as nearby streets which attract a great deal of school traffic). So these more distant streets, at a minimum, should never have been included on the list to lose safe speeds. Yet AT is nonetheless insisting on putting the speed limits back up.

(NOTE: I did a deep dive on streets in Albert-Eden since those are the ones I’m most familiar with, but the results would be similar across Auckland.)

Where to from here?

This is an unconscionably broad reading of the Speed Rule, and one that no other city has taken. Why would a road-controlling authority go out of its way to raise speeds on hundreds of times more streets than required by a sensible reading of the Rule? Especially knowing the impact this will have on deaths and serious injuries. Indeed, AT’s evaluation of safe speeds implemented in Phase 1 and 2 (i.e. between 2020 and 2022) forecasts approximately 564 fewer deaths and serious injuries over a 10-year period. Losing those safe speeds means losing those benefits: a staggering cost in terms of lives lost and life-altering injuries sustained, in terms of grief and pain.

I’ve asked AT in writing, several times, to assure me:

• that only streets in the ‘Schools’ workstream are included in the list of reversals,
• that they are consulting with Hamilton and Dunedin to understand how AT could take the same cautious and life-saving approach,
• and that they are not reversing any more safe speeds than absolutely required by the Rule.

I’ve had no satisfactory reply as yet, so (given that AT is now forging ahead with the return to unsafe speeds) I can only assume they settled for a blanket approach, reversing nearly all safe speeds, no matter the workstream.

The previous Minister of Transport, Simeon Brown, introduced the Speed Rule, and thus bears the primary responsibility for the harm it will cause, but AT will come in for a share as well. Unless they follow other cities’ example in defending their residents, their hands are not clean.

There’s clearly room for a more reasonable approach. After significant community pushback, Chris Bishop as the new Minister of Transport took a common-sense approach to some NZTA-controlled roads, allowing community consultation before speed limits were raised. This avenue is not open to urban road controlling authorities, but AT should urgently be seeking the same common-sense approach for Auckland’s network, as well as ensuring they are going not one step further than the Rule actually requires.

Safe speeds work. AT’s executives and staff know this, and they have publicly acknowledged to Council and to the AT Board that the speed reversals will cause harm. The AT Board was advised on 25 February 2025 that ‘increasing speed limits may increase risks on the network’, including ‘the number and severity of casualties’. The CEO, Dean Kimpton, has told Council directly that AT is opposed to the reversals. So why aren’t they seeking every opportunity to do the right thing?

Safe speeds work, and communities support them. Support across the Albert-Eden Local Board Area for the Phase 2 consultations on safe speeds ranged from 70% in Mt Eden/ Sandringham/ Balmoral to 93% in Mt Albert, with 76% support in Point Chevalier near Pasadena Intermediate and 83% support in Waterview. One resident who wrote to me in dismay at hearing of the speed reversals called the safe speeds on his street a ‘breath of fresh air’.

Other cities have found a way to do the right thing and retain their safe speed zones where there is public support. Aucklanders need answers as to why AT isn’t following their lead, why it isn’t defending its award-winning and life-saving Safe Speeds Programme, and why it is going further even than the Speed Rule requires.

The 2025 theme for Road Safety Week is “Road Safety Heroes”.

Plenty of everyday Aucklanders are road safety heroes, as they walk their children to school, lead bike trains, or advocate for safety improvements in their neighbourhood. They deserve the same heroism from the organisation whose statutory purpose is delivering a transport system that is effective, efficient and safe.

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