How fast is too fast? 'Keep it 100' campaigner takes on Waka Kotahi's Road to Zero
Thursday, 12 May 2022
The days of travelling 100kph on every stretch of major state highway are over. But Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency says many of those who oppose its lowering of speed limits are spreading a gospel of misunderstanding that verges on “misinformation”. Can it slow them down? Chris Hyde reports.
Waka Kotahi has the winding main roads of New Zealand in its sights. It doesn't necessarily want them to be 100kph any more. It would rather be certain they’re safe to drive.
But it’s not been an easy sell. Standing in the way of speed reductions are a vocal subset of the population – from mayors, to those with freight interests, to those who just like travelling at high speeds.
Perhaps the most committed of all of them is a man who used to draw pictures of penises on potholes.
Geoff Upson has morphed from exposing the deterioration of roads around Kaukapakapa near Auckland, into a self-styled 'road safety campaigner'.
He’s been fighting an informal battle with authorities for the best part of three years in a bid to keep speed limits on main arterial roads at 100kph.
**READ MORE:
* Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency 'concerned' by police’s lack of performance on road safety
* Auckland road safety campaigner: I spray-painted penises around highway potholes
* Cost of freight to increase if speed limit reduced
**
Upson’s messaging aims to draw in those who refuse to accept that Waka Kotahi's comprehensive 'Road to Zero' campaign, which has ramped up in recent months, should include speed limit drops.
It’s gained him thousands of followers across several Facebook pages.
There are four key pillars of the Road to Zero campaign; safe roads, safe vehicles, safe drivers, and safe speeds.
Waka Kotahi Road to Zero portfolio manager Tara Macmillan says it’s the proposals for safer speeds that rile people the most.
Every time one is proposed in a different region, there are those who use 'out-of-date' thinking, and misunderstanding bordering on 'misinformation', to try and keep their unsafe speed limit, she says.
But Upson says there’s no misunderstanding. He spends 900 hours a year travelling in his ute to tradie jobs with his dog George.
“If there’s one thing I understand, it’s driving.”
He says lowered speed limits around north Auckland have already increased his time on the road by 30 minutes every week – 26 hours a year – and he's considering a run for political office in a bid to undo it.
'To me, Road to Zero doesn't feel about safety. It feels more about control.'
Transport Minister Michael Wood has seen and heard enough of Upson’s arguments.
'Geoff Upson does call himself a road safety campaigner. But frankly, all he tends to do is argue for us to keep roads to be at speeds that we know on the basis of evidence will result in more people being killed or seriously injured.
'Anyone can give themselves a label, but when you're not actually seriously engaged with the evidence, you're a problem in this debate.'
The speed limit debate: How did we get here?
In 1973 there were 834 deaths on our roads out of a population of just under 3 million. When the open road speed limit was then lowered to cater for an oil shock, there was a noticeable short-term drop in deaths.
Wood says there's widespread recognition that we have a problem on our roads, where 319 died last year, and we have to do something to stop it.
“We kill more people on our roads per head of population than most of the countries we compare ourselves to.
“The carnage is just absolutely horrific. Families, communities, workplaces just ripped to pieces.'
But asking people to actually change their speed to prevent that carnage is something that has cut close to the bone at every level, Wood says.
“Waka Kotahi staff face appalling abuse in response to these issues and I do I have sympathy sometimes for local councils, be they staff or elected members, who make changes in their communities too.
“When people are explicitly expressing that level of aggression, you do need to ask, why? Sometimes there is, frankly, a level of entitlement that sits underneath it.”
Wood says there's no reasonable argument for keeping a speed limit at a level that evidence shows is unsafe.
And when pushed, he accepts the vitriol against speed limit drops shares some parallels with the anti-vaccination movement.
“I hadn't thought about that particular comparison before, but you're right,” Wood said.
“There's something here about a willingness to engage with evidence or not, which obviously shapes the anti vaccination movement, and just a total unwillingness to accept scientific evidence about what keeps our community safer.
“There is also a really interesting point about the difference between what I might want to do as an individual and what I feel benefits me most at this particular point in time, versus the steps that we know will keep our community safer and save lives. And it probably does play out somewhat in this debate.'
Waka Kotahi's Tara Macmillan has the evidence to back up safer speeds - and she wants people to read it.
Macmillan says most people underestimate the safety impacts of reducing the speed limit and at the same time, people tend to overestimate the negative impacts of it.
“We haven't just cooked up a Road to Zero strategy. This isn't unique to New Zealand. We have scanned the globe, and have looked to those leading edge jurisdictions and countries that are seeing tangible and measurable reductions in deaths and serious injuries in countries like Sweden, and Victoria [Australia].
“And we look to the Global Road Safety Forum that regularly releases research and evidence to show what works and why it works. And we monitor the positive impacts of those interventions.”
Macmillan said at higher driving speeds, a 1% increase in speed results in a 3.5% to 4% increase in fatal crashes.
'And then when you flip it the other way, a 5% decrease in average speeds actually delivers about a 10% decrease in all injury crashes, and a 20% reduction in fatal crashes.'
Not only that, but evidence also shows the faster you're travelling, the more likely you are to crash, Macmillan says.
'Speed reduces your capacity to stop in time, it reduces your manoeuvrability and ability to evade a problem, to negotiate curves and corners, and it reduces a driver's field of vision and causes others to misjudge gaps.
'We need people to actually admit that they're not 10 foot tall and bulletproof … and that they are human, and they're going to make mistakes.'
Not everyone will admit they’re not bulletproof
Things look a little different through Upson's eyes.
Where Waka Kotahi sees safety in speed reductions, Upson sees red flags. It's why he's sign written 'Keep it 100' on his ute and why he’s put signs up asking for donations on roads around Auckland.
He's copped some stick for his stubbornness though, especially on social media, where he’s posted videos of himself driving above 100kph, tailgating and swearing as slower drivers block his path, and even one of him mounting a kerb to get around a driver who'd cut him off on a double-laned road.
Upson says he's been surprised how little those in power have been prepared to listen to his arguments about speed.
'I was in high-powered sports car a few months back and we travelled at what would be considered extremely high speeds,' Upson says.
'But I didn't die, because we didn't crash. Just because we're driving 100kph on the open road doesn't mean we're going to crash.”
Upson says he believes at least one fatal crash on roads around Auckland recently was caused because the speed limit on the road had dropped, changing driver behaviour.
'If you're lowering the speed limit you're just making everyone spend more time on the road, which will increase fatigue, and they will be driving slower than what feels appropriate for the human brain, which then leads to distraction.
'So you'll get a lot of people that will be using their phone while they're driving or looking at the scenery rather than watching the road.
'It's really important that when you're driving, you're actually engaged with driving. If you're driving really slowly, you don't have to use your brain very much.'
Upson says when he first heard about planned speed limit drops in his community in 2019, he was shocked he couldn't force a back-down from those in power.
'I thought it would be as simple as just saying, 'hey, don't, please don't do it'.
'I don't want to be a politician. I honestly couldn't think of many jobs worse than being a politician. There's so many bad things to being a politician, but I feel that I need to become a politician.
'Obviously to have any influence … I would need to become the Transport Minister, and you don't just step into politics and become the Transport Minister straightaway.
'So there's a few conversations that I need to be having with political parties.'
Upson says New Zealand needs to be talking about driver behaviour 'rather than penalising everybody by increasing travel times'.
I ask him about his own behaviour on the roads.
'Yes, absolutely, I do break some laws, from time to time, like the speed limit.
'Because I mean, that's my whole thing, I mean, I'm campaigning to get the speed limits up, because I believe that the speed limits are too slow.
'It does happen from time to time where I'm accidentally driving faster than the speed limit because it feels too slow for me.
'So look I'm not I'm not going to tell you that I'm a perfect driver and I obey every single rule.
'But what I'm talking about is when people who don't even have basic competency, basic motor vehicle handling skills. That to me is a bit different.'
‘Pulling all the people down that are competent’
Another railing against speed limit drops is Supercars legend and driver trainer Greg Murphy.
He says Road to Zero is a laudable but unachievable goal. He says Waka Kotahi appears focused on reducing speeds first, and isn't listening to those who oppose it.
Murphy claims a decision to lower the speed limit on the Napier-Taupō Rd was made before the consultation process was even put together.
The consultation prompted thousands of submissions against it, only for Waka Kotahi to lower it from 100kph to 80kph, because it said the submissions had raised nothing it hadn’t previously considered.
'What this is doing is numbing down and pulling all the people down that are competent at 100kph, who are doing the right things, who are focused, who are driving tens of thousands of kilometres every year quite safely,” Murphy says.
'You're just dragging those people – which is the majority by the way – to a nanny kind of situation.
'One hundred kilometres an hour is not that difficult to drive. As you would imagine, I've driven that road a lot bloody faster than 100kph and that's because I know what I'm doing.”
Murphy says the overwhelming feedback received about the Napier-Taupō Rd, officially known as State Highway 5, was that people wanted better maintenance of it to allow them to keep driving at 100kph safely.
'Instead they dropped it anyway, and they’re now spending millions of dollars of taxpayers money on terrible woke ads that will not in any way shape, or form change the way people drive.”
Upper Hutt mayor Wayne Guppy describes a similar proposal to lower speed limits along State Highway 2 through his district as a fait accompli.
“If you look at history, that's what will happen, and that's sort of frustration that is being echoed across the country.
“They [Waka Kotahi] tend not to listen. They tend to say ‘here's how we're going to fix it. You can come back and tell us what you like. But guess what? It's going to be 80kph anyhow’.
Guppy describes State Highway 2 through his neck of the Hutt Valley as a road of national importance which has traffic flows that are comparable to State Highway 1. To lower it below 100kph because it wasn't safe enough would be nothing short of a “disgrace”, he said.
“The opposition to it won't die out – too many people use that road.”
Marlborough mayor John Leggett says when Waka Kotahi lowered speed limits on a stretch between Blenheim and Nelson in 2020 there was vociferous opposition, but that was no longer the case.
'It may have added a few minutes onto the time of the journey, but I think it's much more pleasant to drive now.
“You can only ever save a few minutes, you can never make a huge saving by being able to go to at a higher speed. It's just really about getting your head around change, and often people don’t like change.”
Wood says he feels for leaders across the political aisle who are faced with proposals to change a highway speed limit to a safe speed limit in their community.
“It does meet a lot of local resistance and local MPs and local government politicians do feel the pressure of that – that's just the reality.”
Change is hard, but speed is a public health issue, Waka Kotahi says
Waka Kotahi's Tara Macmillan says the people who support lower speeds don't raise their voices as much, but they exist all the same.
Unfortunately, she said, the Covid climate had made reduced speed limits harder for people to process.
'We're not shying away from the fact that there are lots of people out there that do not like change that purely enjoy driving fast and that very much is a challenge that we see across the world.
'Change is hard at the best of times and we know that it's difficult for people that aren't ready or willing to change.
'But this pandemic has forced so much change and adaptation onto people. And we're finding that they're really struggling to take on more.'
Macmillan said those who called for more driver training or better maintained roads or better road policing as their 'one solution' to preventing deaths, while simultaneously opposing speed limit drops, were indulging in thinking that was 'quite out of date'.
'Those approaches are very much reactive and only get us so far,” Macmillan said.
'I think when you look at the topography of New Zealand and our lovely winding roads that go up hill and down, there's a lot of our network that you literally can't safely travel at a higher speed.
'Look, people are entitled to their views. Our job is to make sure that we inform them so that we can help shape their views to make sure that we're striving for a safe outcome.
'The evidence is overwhelming that having 100kph speed limits is not safe for many parts of our network.
'And many of those parts of the network are not candidates for getting the level of infrastructure that we require them to have to be able to travel at those higher speeds.
'So we have to shift the conversation. And I think that the trick here is to actually firstly get people to recognise that road safety actually is a public health issue.'
Professor Alistair Woodward, an epidemiologist and public health doctor from the University of Auckland, says the same debates playing out around speed right now, mirror the debate when seatbelts were introduced.
People argued at the time that seatbelts wouldn’t be needed if drivers were better, and that behaviours would get more risky if people strapped themselves in, Woodward said.
'The benefits of prevention are invisible, but the inconvenience is immediately apparent and so people get upset – it's a very common thing.'
Once public health proposals are actually introduced, people don’t feel nearly as strongly about them – from fluoride in water to folic acid in bread, and even smokefree environments, Woodward said.
He said in Auckland the majority of those seriously injured in road crashes are now pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.
'In other words, they're people who are struck by cars, they're not people inside cars.
'These vulnerable road users now make up 60% of casualties, and in a way surely that makes it even more important that we get something as simple as a speed limit right.'
The awkward reality of living on a 100kph road
Macmillan says safer speeds are not a silver bullet, and all aspects of Road to Zero will need to play a part if Waka Kotahi is going to be able to reduce road deaths by 40% by 2030, its midterm goal.
'We're asking people to simply walk through the door where they sign up to the fact that no one deserves to die or be seriously injured on our roads.'
That’s something that's easier to for people to do when it's very close to home, Wood notes.
'There's a very interesting contradiction, which is that actually most people will support a safer and lower speed limit right where they live, because it’s their kids and their well-being who are most at risk, but they want the minimal possible constraints in other areas.”
Murphy says he agrees with many of the speed limit drops around his home region of Hawke's Bay and says places like Longlands Rd near Hastings, actually still need even lower limits. The state highways are different, he says.
Upson says his own home road - Oyster Point Rd - has a 100kph speed limit right now.
Is that a reasonable speed limit, I ask him?
'It's too fast for the road,' he says with a laugh.
“It's a country road with no centre line. We have a lot of stock trucks, people walk their horses up the road, people walk and run up the road, and people ride their bikes too.
'I would never ask for the speed limit to be reduced on my road, because it’s not physically possible to drive 100kph.
'The only issue is that the 100kph main road, which has about 7000 traffic movements a day, changed from 100 to 80.'