Pop the Hood: Are Speed Limit Reversals Taking Us in the Wrong Direction?
This is a guest post by Vinetta Plummer, Policy and Government Lead for Healthy Families Waitākere, West Auckland mum of two, community advocate, and school board member.
Written for Road Safety Week 2025, the post reflects on the government’s reversal of safer speed limits through a local, lived lens and explores how these changes undermine years of community-informed planning, raise serious equity concerns, and signal a broader pattern of rolling back evidence-based policy in favour of short-term economics.…
On politics, professional ethics, and premature death on our roads
Today’s guest post is an open letter by Dr Bridget Doran, a transportation engineer, researcher, and human factors psychologist, on the question of politics and professional ethics in the context of the new Speed Rule.
It’s a timely read for our local audience.…
Weekly Roundup 18-October-2024
Happy Friday, and welcome to another round-up of interesting stories about what’s happening in Auckland and other cities. Feel free to add your links in the comments!
This post, like all our work, is brought to you by a largely volunteer crew and made possible by generous donations from our readers and fans.…
The Policy and Memory Vortex
When you start doing research into transport and urban topics and policies, one thing you realise is how messy and chaotic many government websites are. Given that these are (in theory) the most accessible version of the official archive, that’s a challenge.…
Road deaths are falling – let’s keep doing that
There’s plenty wrong with this government’s approach to road safety, and nowhere is that more exemplified than their push to ignore evidence by imposing blanket speed limits (mostly raises), thus undoing work all around the country by councils and Waka Kotahi to improve road safety.…
June-24 AT Board Meeting
Today the Auckland Transport board meets again,so I’ve taken a look through the items on their public agenda to see what’s interesting.
Musical Chairs
The first item of note is another change to the make-up of the AT Board. The legislation that established Auckland Transport allows for Waka Kotahi to have a non-voting director on the board.…
Don’t Look Up
An interesting announcement from Waka Kotahi yesterday about a trial of safety cameras From tomorrow, across three Auckland locations, we're trialing safety cameras to get a better understanding of how many people drive while using their mobile phones, and how many people don’t wear their seatbelts: https://t.co/EyBgjJfyGi…
Weekly Roundup – 4-June-21
How is it June already?? Here’s our roundup for the week that was… and it’s a bumper edition, in honour of the long weekend. (Happy birthday, Your Majesty!) Liberate the Lane: managing traffic – and expectations
Last Sunday’s Liberate the Lane rally (and subsequent bridge ride) attracted heaps of attention, which was precisely the point.…
Healthy Streets Alliance calls for submissions on safer speeds proposal
This is a guest post from Healthy Streets Alliance spokesperson Ellie Craft
This week we launched the Healthy Streets Alliance. The alliance is made up of citizens’ advocacy groups and non-profit charities, including NZ School Speeds, Brake the road safety charity, Doctors for Active Sustainable Transport, Visual Impairment Charitable Trust Aotearoa (NZ), Greater Auckland, Generation Zero, Urban Auckland, Incorporated Society for Alternative Housing Developments, Bike Auckland, Cycling Action Network, Grey Lynn 2030, Living Streets Aotearoa, Women in Urbanism Aotearoa, Urban Design Forum, Sky Path, the Auckland City Centre Residents Group, and Transition Towns Point Chevalier.…
Copenhagen: Confirmation of the future sensual city
In August this year Greater Auckland reproduced a chapter I wrote for a book speculating on our future world, The Big Questions, in three posts; here, here, and here. Included was the section below describing the city centre. In bold is a short description of what I imagine the sensual experience of these future streets will be like:
The whole Queen Street valley will be car-free, plied only by emergency and delivery and service vehicles, the latter at set times.…
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