This community chooses 30km/h

This is a guest post by Charmaine Vaughan, Secretary of the Meadowbank St Johns Residents’ Association, about how her community took the initiative in the face of recent mandatory speed raises. 

In Meadowbank on a sunny Saturday afternoon not so long ago, the streets were filled with the sounds of birds singing and kids out and about by themselves. What a joy to hear kids’ voices chattering in conversation and delight at the freedom of being out and about by themselves on an adventure.

Standing there, I was struck by the immersiveness of the experience: this, I realised, is what safer streets mean to children. 

The evidence shows that 30kmh streets are safer for everyone, especially vulnerable road users (children, older people, disabled people, pets). In real terms, this translates into parents and caregivers feeling safe to let children venture to the playground, pop to the dairy, make their own way to their friends’ houses, and even make their own way to school.

Thanks to safe speed limits, kids get to enjoy the freedom a lot of us enjoyed when we were their age, when streets were inherently safer because there was less traffic.

Parent and child on Te Ara ki Uta ki Tai, the Glen Innes to Tamaki Drive shared path – accessible via the streets of Meadowbank if they’re safe to cycle on

Government made a choice

Sadly, as of 1 July this freedom – to explore their communities and get to school independently by foot, scooter or bike – has come to an end for the children of Meadowbank and many, many other communities across Tāmaki Makaurau and the rest of Aotearoa.

That’s because of the Government’s new Speed Rule. You probably know the whole sorry story. Against the advice of experts, the government has forced councils to raise speed limits. This includes removing neighbourhood-wide 30km/h zones anywhere that safer speeds were introduced because a school was nearby.

Yes, that’s counterintuitive, to put it mildly. (And replacing these 30km/h neighbourhoods with tiny time-limited zones at school gates makes it less safe for children to get to school, let alone around their local community).

Relentless advocacy ensued across the motu, with conversations, meetings and emails happening at every level from cabinet ministers to local MPs, councillors, and local boards. Communities rallied together to raise their concerns. The impact hit Tamaki Makaurau hardest, with over 1400 streets around over a hundred schools in dozens of neighbourhoods falling under the shadow of the new Speed Rule.

Advocates, experts and councils battled to bring evidence and nuance to the situation, leading to a variety of different outcomes. Some road-controlling authorities chose to interpret the central government’s new Speed Rule in ways that kept safer speeds around schools. This leadership spurred those of us in Tamaki Makaurau to advocate even harder – but sadly our road-controlling authority, Auckland Transport, did not interpret the Rule the same way.

We fought the return of unsafe speeds till the very end, or at least what felt like the end, as the new 50kmh signage started appearing around the city.

But then, just as I’d sent my final, last-ditch email appealing for a reprieve, I remembered a key fact.

Communities can choose, too

In my local community of Meadowbank, when Auckland Transport consulted us in 2021, 70% of people supported safer speeds. And in an even more recent Residents’ Association survey, 77% supported safer speeds.

In other words, our community chose 30kmh… not just once, but twice!

An idea formed in my mind. Why not share this fact where people can see it?

So the Meadowbank St Johns Residents Association designed and produced twenty signs, expressing our preference for safe and people-friendly streets.

We’re now installing them in key locations around the neighbourhood, which includes two schools, a kindy and a retirement village, a train station, and a major walking and cycling route that links us all the way to the city and out to Glen Innes.

To be clear, these are not official speed signs – they’re advisory signs. They offer a community point of view, in conversation with the new 50kmh speed signs. They remind everyone, including those new to the neighbourhood or just visiting, that this community strongly prefers calmer streets. Because they’re safer, and they’re more neighbourly.

Other residential areas are welcome to borrow this approach. The government didn’t ask us before raising speeds. So it’s perfectly fair for communities to express what we think.

Choosing to express ourselves: how we did it

I am lucky enough to be part of a great Residents’ Association, which believes that our streets are a key asset in making this a great place to live, for people of all ages. So when I suggested my idea, they were all supportive. An added bonus is that we have funds in the bank to cover the $290 to print 20 corflute signs.

I whipped up the artwork in Canva – see below, which you are welcome to use and adapt as suits. Or design your own.

An adaptable template for a community advisory sign

Next I found a great local printer, and within a few days we had the signs in our hot little hands. We drilled holes in the corflute, grabbed some cable ties and a wee step-stool, and we were good to go.

Freshly printed corflutes ready to be installed.

This area of Meadowbank is a self-contained “peninsula” – there are no through-roads to anywhere else  and there are only about five or six roads running into it. So that’s where we focused on putting up our first signs, as well as near one of the schools and the kindy, for obvious reasons.

An annotated screenshot of AT’s speed reversal viewer map showing key locations

Probably the trickiest part was finding appropriate places to install our signs. We didn’t want to put them on the official road signs, so we attached them to handy power poles. One unexpected issue was that being such a lovely leafy green suburb, a few spots that would have been otherwise perfect were obscured by trees.

It took us a bit longer than we expected to put up our first eight signs, because as well as taking some time to find the best spots, we ended up having lots of chats with locals who fully supported what we were doing.

An advisory “Our community chooses 30” sign near a 50 speed sign.

What happens next?

We plan to leave the signs up for as long as needed. For now, the new Speed Rule has completely removed the option of 30kmh in urban residential areas, which is frankly just weird considering both the science and our community stance. So our signs are a placeholder, for as long as it takes, reminding everyone of what we know to be true.

In theory, under the new Speed Rule communities like Meadowbank could push Auckland Transport for a fresh consultation on an area-wide 40kmh. This would be safer than 50km/h, but not as safe as 30km/h. It would also mean resources spent on consultation, communication, and printing and installing new signs, just to confirm what we’ve already made clear, twice.

Alternatively, we can hope that a future government (or a minister with a more rational, locally-led approach) will give us back the freedom to choose 30km/h limits. That would be ideal. After all, Auckland Transport must have a warehouse somewhere full of 30 signs that could be swapped back in.

Would a potential 40kmh “bird in the hand” be better than waiting for a return to the evidence-based and community-preferred 30kmh in the future? I don’t know – but I do know that by firmly reminding everyone that we choose 30, we are doing our best to ensure some continuity of safety for our children. And that’s the most important thing.

Charmaine, with one of the original 30 signs: easily swapped back when rationality returns.

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