Road safety campaigner Geoff Upson says there are other ways to prevent crashes on New Zealand's roads other than reducing speed limits.
The NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi earlier this year launched the campaign 'Road to Zero', aiming to have no deaths or serious incidents on the country's roads by 2050.
Upson has been campaigning to make New Zealand roads safer since 2018 and wants the Road to Zero campaign to focus more on the quality of the country's roads and less on dropping speed limits.
"Forcing us to drive slowly is not the way to do that we need to be focusing on more important things," he told AM. "Driver education [and] basic motor vehicle handling skills are something that this country is lacking. For example, most people don't even know what a tyre footprint is. "Basic motor vehicle handling skills are not something that we are required to know or understand, in order to get a driver's licence."
Upson fears drivers will become frustrated by reducing speed limits.
"I drove from Auckland to Wellington last weekend which could've added an hour or an hour and a half if all of these speed limits were reduced from what I consider a safe and appropriate 100km/h down to a slower 80km/h or even a slower 60 km/h.
"Then we look at other issues such as fatigue, falling asleep at the wheel - we are going to see more frustration, tailgating and that's what we are seeing on these roads where the speed limit has been reduced."
Upson accused the Government of not using sufficient taxpayer money for road maintenance.
"We pay a lot of money, we pay road user charges, we pay fuel tax, we pay petrol tax, we pay regional fuel tax, obviously we pay annual rego fees - so we are contributing a huge amount of money to fix the road yet that money is being spent on other things," he said. "We need to be cancelling things like the speed bumps, for example, there was one speed bump that was $250,000 - that's a quarter of a million dollars for one speed bump."
Spending that much money on things such as speed bumps should mean there are sufficient funds for other road maintenance, Upson said.
A spokesperson for Minister of Transport Michael Wood told Newshub in a statement: "The Government is investing close to $7 billion in local road and state highway maintenance as part of the NLTP 21-24, which will see around 7,000 lane kilometres of state highway and 18,000 lane kilometres of local roads renewed. Since coming into government, we have boosted road maintenance spending by nearly 50 per cent to help bring our roads back up to scratch."
