Draft Katoa, Ka Ora: Auckland speed management plan 2024-2027 Draft Katoa, Ka Ora: Auckland speed management plan 2024-2027
Public consultation is now closed.
Overview
Auckland Transport takes a holistic approach, a Safe System approach, to improving road safety. Safe speeds, although just one piece of the puzzle, protect the people we love, and allow families to lead active, healthy lives.
So far, we’ve created safe speeds on over a third of Auckland’s road network, by kilometre of road.
On 30 May 2023, the Auckland Regional Transport Committee adopted the draft version of draft Katoa, Ka Ora: Auckland speed management plan 2024-2027 for public consultation.
This page provides you with an overview of the draft Katoa, Ka Ora plan. Here, you’ll also find the full draft document to read.
Background
Aucklanders say there are things they like about New Zealand’s long-established speed limits, especially that there are only a few familiar numbers to understand.
People worry, though, if we change speed limits, there are things they’ll have to get used to, like:
- longer travel times
- new speed limit numbers
- a variety of signs.
They don’t want to do the wrong thing by mistake.
We’ve also heard that there are things about the current speed limits people don’t like, such as:
- the harm caused to people and communities by unsafe speeds
- the effect this has on parents letting their children walk or bike to school. This adds to congestion because parents feel they have to drive their kids to the school gate.
Research from 2023 shows that 61 percent of Aucklanders believe that lower speed limits could help reduce the number of serious injuries and deaths on Auckland roads, with 74 percent of Aucklanders willing to accept increases in travel time if it would help make travel safer in Auckland.
The benefits of safe speeds
We all want the benefits of safe speeds, and internationally, we’re in good company. Melbourne’s city centre, Toronto, Cardiff and Liverpool are just some of the cities that have significant 30km/h or 20mph zones or have made recent decisions to implement these.
Safe speeds protect the people we love, and allow families to lead active, healthy lives in neighbourhoods with less traffic.
Safe speeds are just one piece of the puzzle in creating safe roads, but they are the main factor in determining whether a crash is survivable, and the data shows us that where we’ve already made changes, it’s working.
It’s also less costly to set safe speed limits than to change the road environment. Independent economic assessments of four proposed safe speed limit approaches around schools reveal these can be low cost, high benefit actions.
Read the full High Level Economic Assessment report.
What does the draft Katoa, Ka Ora plan propose?
The draft Katoa, Ka Ora document proposes safe speeds for:
- school zones so children feel safer walking to school
- safe neighbourhood zones so everyone is safe on roads around their home
- safe rural areas so country people are safe on rural roads.
We’re talking about around another quarter of the roading network, by kilometre of road, across the Auckland region. That is, we propose to make permanent speed changes for just over 1800 km of roads, and variable speed change proposals for 196km of roads.
The impact in terms of time, is an increase of less than 15 seconds over an average 20-minute car journey.
Finally, to make it as easy for people to understand as possible, we’ll use colourful road markings when entering a safe speed area and simple, consistent signs, and we’ll keep familiar speeds for our largest and busiest urban roads.
The things we have to do
We’re working towards legislative targets to set safe speeds around all schools by 2027.
We’ve already been talking to our partners, schools, and community representatives about what safe speeds mean to them.
You can read here about the consultation we have already completed, which helped us develop the draft Katoa, Ka Ora document.
July 2022 Technical Workshop Key Themes and AT responses (PDF 128KB)
July 2022 Technical Workshop Report (PDF 2.9MB)
Local Board Feedback Report (PDF 2.5MB)
December 2022 Katoa, Ka Ora conversations 2 safe speed limits around schools Report (PDF 643KB)
The 2023 public consultation
Public consultation on the draft version of Katoa, Ka Ora: Auckland speed management plan 2024-2027 was open from 2 July to 28 August 2023. 7,800 responses from the public were received.
The feedback reports will be published here when they are completed.
In the meantime, you can read the draft Katoa, Ka Ora: Auckland speed management plan 2024-2027, along with the supporting documents.
- Draft Katoa, Ka Ora executive summary (PDF 1.1MB)
- Draft Katoa, Ka Ora: Auckland Speed Management Plan 2024-2017 (PDF 46MB)
- Draft three-year speed limits implementation programme (1.2MB)
- Draft safety infrastructure and safety camera support information (118KB)
- Waka Kotahi interim speed management plan - Appendix 3 (PDF 25MB)