Enough's enough: Small-town NZ demands lower highway speed limits to save lives

Saturday, 30 June 2018

Jackie Ludgate knows she and her young daughters are lucky to be alive after a 100kmh crash on a state highway passing land that runs right through the middle of a small South Canterbury village.

In the other car, 40-year-old Daniel Anderson wasn't so lucky.

The government is under new pressure from provincial communities to lower 100kmh speed limits through small-town New Zealand.

The 430 residents of Pareora, where Ludgate was seriously injured in a three-car smash, fear more of their own will be killed. In the Waikato, the regional transport committee wrote this week to Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter to ask for support in reducing the speed limit on rural roads to 80-90kph. 

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And in Waverley, Taranaki, seven people were killed in one horror smash thought to be the worst in more than a decade. 

Last night – at the halfway mark of 2018 – the road death toll stood at 199 after a dismal week on the roads that saw 10 people die.

As part of her exploration of a vision zero approach to reduce the already high road toll , Associate Transport Minister Julie Anne Genter this weekend promised to make it easier for local communities to reduce their speed limits where necessary. 

In the small town of Pareora, on the outskirts of Timaru, residents are angry their pleas for the speed limit to be reduced have so far fallen on deaf ears. 

The New Zealand Transport Agency is promising to review the town's speed limit at a meeting this month but locals say it's taken more than a year of campaigning to get to that point. 

The section of road which runs through the town - a crash prone area of State Highway 1 - has seen eight major crashes in the past five years. Three, including two in the past 10 months, were fatal.

A passing lane runs through the town, and the speed limit is 100kmh. 

Resident Bert McCarthy believes Pareora has the most extreme speed limits of any town in the country and something needs to be done before someone else gets killed.

Dunedin woman Jackie Ludgate was seriously injured in a three-car crash on that stretch of road last year. The crash killed Timaru man Daniel Anderson and seriously injured his daughter. 

A year on Ludgate is due to have further surgery on her spine later this year. 'We're doing as well as we can really,' Ludgate says.

Comparatively, the township of Orari, 30km north of Timaru, has a reduced speed limit of 80kmh and Hinds, a small town 18km south of Ashburton, has a reduced speed limit of 70kmh.

McCarthy believes there isn't another town in the South Island with a passing lane running through it and is concerned by the lack of action taken by various agencies. 

'For the amount of vehicles that are travelling up and down every day, it's just atrocious.'

Earlier this year a landmark International Transport Forum report out of France recommended all roads without median barriers reduce their speed limit to 70kmh but at the time Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern wouldn't rule that option in or out. 

Senior University of Auckland transport engineering lecturer Doug Wilson says the simplest and most cost effective way to reduce the road toll would be to reduce speed zones. 

Many towns had graduated speed restrictions and Pareora 'does sound like a situation that should be considered for a speed limit reduction through the town'.

He said being on SH1 and on a heavy traffic route, it was likely to have up to 6000 vehicles passing through each day.

'You can see the perspective of the truck drivers and people travelling between Timaru and Dunedin but I would suggest that even a limit of 70 or 80 km an hour as a compromise between 100 km and 50 for an urban area would be appropriate. I am surprised that they haven't looked at it.'

Director of road safety charity Brake, Caroline Perry, shared the Pareora community's concerns. 

'There are a lot of roads around the country where the posted speed limit is simply not the safe limit, because it doesn't match the road conditions, and this is putting lives at risk. We also have community facilities, even schools, which still have 100km/h limits on the roads running past them.

'Concerns raised by local communities should be listened to and investigated, with safety measures such as lower speed limits and median barriers implemented where appropriate.'

NZTA defended the current speed limit, a spokesperson saying the Pareora township was located far enough away from the highway. 

There were a few houses and an unmanned petrol station, and the speed limit was a reflection of the development adjacent to the highway.

'So drivers would see this as a continuation of the rural environment they have been travelling through and the appropriate speed limit is 100kmh.' 

A report on the safety of that stretch of SH1, and options for making it safer, will be considered at an infrastructure committee meeting later this month.

Genter would not comment on Pareora's concerns but said reducing speed limits in appropriate areas was one of the ways in which the Government would tackle the road toll, and promised to reduce red tape for councils in order to reduce speed limits.