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.
Yeah I think we are on the same page, nobody argues harder than two people who agree with eachother.
When I was a testosterone charged teen/20yo speed was all important. I grew out of it, many do not.
And yes, modern divided highways/motorways can and should be higher limited. Most are not modern nor divided. The Waikato expressway is 110km/h. It’s great.
Also, if I hit a pole at 120km/h then the impact speed is 120km/h. If I have a head-on at 80km/h then the impact speed is 160km/h. So physically segregating traffic is the most effective infrastructure change to make, it is slow and expensive and impractical in most places.
Lowering limits on old crappy roads is the cheapest and therefore most efficient option.
I also initially thought that was the case, but it’s not! http://warp.povusers.org/grrr/collisionmath.html There’s no difference between 80km/h against a pole or wall vs 80km/h head on.
Fascinating! TYVM for that.
Though, I’ll argue that even in my flawed examples having double the number of vehicles in the collision is still worse: double the casualties. It’s just technically the same as two vehicles having independent collisions.
Oh, also: it improves the effectiveness of lowering the speed limit versus infrastructure upgrades.
Neat.