A road safety advocate has slammed National's plan to end speed reductions, claiming it would "endanger" everyone on New Zealand's roads.
National on Sunday morning said it wanted to "accelerate New Zealand", including repealing and replacing legislation that lays out how speed limits are set and allowing motorists to drive up to 110km/h on more roads, like Transmission Gully.
"Under the guise of safety, Labour has exposed its anti-car ideology by slowing down New Zealanders going about their daily lives," National's transport spokesperson Simeon Brown said.
But the plan hasn't gone down well with road safety advocate Lucinda Rees who said if National is elected they will remove any benefits that Aotearoa's "society have gained".
She said road safety should be removed from politics and believes National has announced its plan to try to gain a few votes.
She also hit out at the comments Brown made that "slowing speeds is under the guise of safety".
"Really! It's akin to saying that we should have a right to carry arms. This would endanger everyone on our roads - not just children - just for the sake of a few votes," she said.
"Safer roads encourage pedestrians and cyclists to give it a go, which combats climate change while taking cars off the road. Has Mr Brown not researched why speed limits are in place?"
She wants to see a consistent 30km/h speed limit outside all schools around the country.
"At 30km/h a person has a 90 percent chance of surviving being hit by a vehicle," Rees said.
Rees cited the World Health Organisation which found an increase in an average speed of 1km/h results in a three percent higher risk of a crash and a four to five percent increase in fatalities.
She also believes ending speed reductions would be a "huge waste of precious taxpayer money" as transport experts have been working for years to make them happen.
"Some speed limit reductions are still short of what they really should be, but great things take time and it seems that great things can also be demolished by an irresponsible action of a political party that should know better," Rees said.
"Road safety measures are as much about changing the culture of how we drive, as they are making roads safer for all who use them."
But not everyone was against National's plan, with AA Road Safety spokesperson Dylan Thomsen saying there are a lot of things in the plan he "would support".
He pointed to the 110km/h speed limits on the new expressways around the country as something that "makes a lot of sense".
"Looking at using variable speed limits around schools at the start and end of the school day, another idea that has really good support and makes good sense," Thomsen told AM on Monday.
Locals in the Wairarapa have also been frustrated about a reduced speed limit on one of their major roads.
Labour MP for Wairarapa Kieran McAnulty told AM earlier this month that as associate Transport Minister he had asked Waka Kotahi to review the speed limit on State Highway 2 connecting the Remutakas to Masterton, which was recently lowered to 80km/h.
"They said 'no' and that was the end of the matter," he said. "They have statutory independence from ministers and we cannot instruct them what to do in terms of operational decisions."
McAnulty told AM the lowered speed limits are a "massive source of frustration" to the region and he's written numerous letters to the agency asking for them to change the speed limit back to 100km/h.
Thomsen said the roads around the Remutakas are a great example of where variable speed limits should be imposed.
"You've got the Remutakas, which is really windy and narrow, and we actually supported the idea of a lower limit than 100km/h on that stretch of road," he said.
"But then you come down, you go through Featherston and you go on and then you have these quite wide, very straight stretches of highway and some of those stretches had had very few crashes in recent periods."
Thomsen also believes speed reductions have become a polarising topic.
"We've polarised this. We've gone to this black and white are you for or against speed reductions? It's more sophisticated than that," he said.
"They can make good sense in certain places, in other places other options are better."
Following National's announcement on Sunday, Labour leader Chris Hipkins said his Government had already made the transport agency reduce the scale of its proposed changes to speed limits.
"I don't think they got the memo," he said. "I made an announcement on this earlier in the year, that we're reducing that work down to just the top 1 percent of the most at-risk roads in New Zealand, that's already happening.
"I understand that they've announced that they want to increase the speed limit on Transmission Gully, for example, that's already in process."
He said National was just "packaging up stuff that's already happening now and trying to make it look like it's their own".
Watch the full interview with Dylan Thomsen in the video above.
