Benoire:

 

sen8or:

 

As above, I don't advocate for an "acceptable casualty rate", but its all but impossible for there not to be one. We should be making our roads safer through technology improvements, using better roading surfaces, putting barriers up where appropriate, adding additional passing lanes and/or dual carraige way roads and driver education rather than simply burying our heads in the "speed is evil" sand bucket!

 

 

The cost of roading is substantial, asphalts are incredibly costly in NZ (I managed a 300m rebuild to slightly less than European standards in Auckland for Structural AC at 10x the cost for what I did a KM in before I left London).  We have limited budgets, limited supply of bitumen that is costly, not many coating plants across the country and a funding regime which tries to sweat the asset because the cost to build for low operational expenditure is crippling from a capital perspective.  A lot of the older roads where not designed around modern car speeds and the geometries are not even to standard, hence why we have a lot of advisory curve signs on the rural network.  Fixing them to a modern standard for sight distance, safe avoidance etc. is too much for the regions to bear and as such either passing lanes or barriers is the best option.  Where this cannot be done due to financial availability from the NLTP then reducing speed limits is the best approach at reducing harm.

 

Remember reckless behaviour can be from an accidental issue as well as a pre-determined thought, but the consequences can be far far worse and we should be doing our very best to reduce the chance of the consequence.  Humans are not very good at resisting kinetic energy.  As Kinetic energy is mv2, the velocity is the most important part of the equation, aka speed and we can only tolerate 30 kph on foot or bike and upto 70 kph in a vehicle, anything more than that and the risk of death or serious injury increases substantially... This is why there is a focus on speed as a method to reduce death and serious injury on the road network.

 

Undoubtedly the cost is expensive, which is why there are multiple approaches that could be taken, the Govt just go for the easiest.

An interesting cost/benefit study could be the cost of the road works (whichever method they take), less the cost of accidents etc, then see how much they really cost the taxpayer? Not sure the data would support the spend or if its even available.