CAMBRIDGE NEWS | 1
FRIDAY FEBRUARY 8, 2019
Your Local Paper
www.cambridgenews.nz
FEBRUARY 8, 2019
Life in the slower lane
The Cambridge CBD will be a 40km/h zone under the new plan.
200 speed limit drops planned for Waipā Cambridge’s town centre will become a 40km/h zone for drivers under far-reaching proposals the Waipā District Council called for submissions on this week. The council has come up with a whopping 200-plus speed changes in the wake of a public consultation series as part of its Safer Roads, Safer Waipā programme, part of a national roading initiative. It says 84 of the proposals are “significant”. The plan to cut the limit from 50 to 40km/h in Cambridge – where an average 16,000 vehicles are driven through the CBD
every day - is mirrored in Te Awamutu. The changes in Te Awamutu would not impact on limits on SH3. The council says the review is justified because population numbers are rising, the roads are catering for a wide range of users including cars, pedestrians, cyclists and heavy vehicles – and because a pedestrian hit by a car at 40km/h has a 70 percent chance of surviving, compared to 15 percent at 50km/h. It is expected Waipā district’s population will rise by a further 25,000 by 2050. The council’s speed limit bylaw proposal
says almost 340 submissions were received in response to calls for comments and public drop-in sessions late last year. Of those, almost 200 complained that current speed limits made their roads unsafe. The submissions prompted a raft of proposed speed reductions on rural roads. A sample of comments presented by the council including this one: “Our rural roads can be outright scary with speeding motorists on the one hand, and local traffic turning in and out of driveways, as well as many cyclists, tractors, etc., on the other.”
The council’s Road Corridor Manager Bryan Hudson said he was confident about the rigour of the submissions. “We were hearing about skids marks, broken fences and crashes – and that drivers appeared to feel obliged to overtake because the speed limit was 100km/h,” he said. The data presented in the report showed Waipā had an average 240 significant road crashes a year – they claimed an average of two lives a year and left 18 people with serious injuries.
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