Up to 93 per cent of Wellington City streets could have 30km/h speed limits under a draft proposal by the Council.
The Wellington City Council is required to introduce safer speed limits near all of the 81 schools located in the capital by the end of 2027, as part of the Government’s Road to Zero strategy.
The city has a high concentration of schools in a small geographic area.
It has determined 80 per cent of urban streets are near or within walking distance of a primary, intermediate, or secondary school. The council is also looking at safer speed limits near the likes of kindergartens and playcentres.
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Once this is all taken into consideration, as well as ensuring new speeds are staggered, Council transport and infrastructure manager Brad Singh (above) says about 93 per cent of Wellington streets were captured by the proposal to reduce limits to 30km/h: “The big thing to remember is that at 30km/h you have such a massively more realistic chance of walking away from a crash and not suffering serious injury or fatality than at 50km/h.
The draft plan has now gone to public consultation, so ratepayers can have their say.
The risk of pedestrian death is about four to five times higher in a collision between a vehicle and a pedestrian at 50km/h compared to 30km/h, Council documents say.
Between 2012 and 2021 there were 3992 injuries reported from crashes on Wellington City’s urban street network, including State Highways.
This number included 31 fatalities and 650 serious injuries with an estimated social cost of $945 million, council documents say.
Over the same time period, there were 1801 crashes in Lower Hutt, 598 in Upper Hutt and 927 in Porirua.
Singh says arterial roads or “main drags” in the city like Waterloo Quay would remain at 50km/h: “It is a thoroughfare and people need to use that for the economics of the city to keep ticking along.”
The proposal to reduce speed limits was not so different to the actual speeds people were currently driving, Singh says. On average people drive 35km/h on arterial routes and 23km/h outside arterial routes.
Environment and Infrastructure Committee chairwoman councillor Tamatha Paul says lowering speed limits would calm communities: “We won’t have cars racing around. It will make communities and neighbourhoods safe for kids to enjoy.”
Paul says these speed limit changes wouldn’t make an impact on their own.
Coupled with low-traffic neighbourhoods, traffic-calming measures, and urban design, Wellingtonians could see more children playing on the city’s streets again, she says.