Alternative headline: National to spend $30m to sacrifice some of your lives so our trip is slightly faster.
The changes have been endorsed by transport researchers and street safety advocates as effective measures to help reduce the number of Kiwis killed and injured on the roads.
That's all there is to it.
I think it’s generous to take what they say at face value. They often slap on this sort of handwaving away of the predictable negative outcomes of whatever they’re proposing to roll back. It’s not actually backed up with anything - it’s just designed to let them have it both ways.
Kinda like their tax cuts they say won’t be inflationary, and their foreign buyer ban relaxation that they say somehow won’t lead to house prices going up.
The evidence that lower speed limits actually helps is pretty tenuous, and there’s also the lost time and productivity to consider.
It seems to depend on where you count your costs and benefits, and who is included in that.
Research seems to say that lower speeds are beneficial to society overall in a range of ways, National only seem to be counting car drivers and their right to continue taking up most of our public road space at the expense of everyone else.
https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/news/2022/lower-speed-limits-dont-just-save-lives-they-make-nz-towns-and-cities-better-places-to-live.html
OK, but this is talking about urban speed limits, whereas National’s focus is mostly on open road limits.
No it isn’t, they’ve said they’re rolling back both
They’ve said they’re rolling them back unless it wouldn’t be safe to do so, and most of their press talks about open road limits.
It sounds like most of the urban limits will stay.