A blanket of misinformation

Two old sayings have been on my mind lately. The first is: “The pen is mightier than the sword”, describing the power of language and communication to help or to harm.

The other, which captures the speed with which falsehoods can become ingrained and hard to undo, is: “A lie can run halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

In the modern era, subject to a daily deluge of information, we need to pay attention to how problems and issues are framed – the way stories are told and indeed “sold” to us. That affects how we decide to solve these issues, and even whether we think they’re an issue at all.

Awash in a flood of news about things we might not know much about, but which affect all of us, we have to trust other voices, aka “the media” – whether it be journalists, experts, commentators, or blogs like Greater Auckland – to investigate and ask questions.

Many do an excellent job, but it can be easy to miss a step.

For example, looking at recent media coverage of the government’s proposed speed limits increases, you could be forgiven for assuming there’s a factual basis for Simeon Brown’s repeated claims that a) the last government implemented ‘blanket’ speed reductions, and b) the public doesn’t approve of safer speeds. For examples, see: Stuff (1, 2), RNZ (1,2, 3, 4) and 1news (1, 2, 3, 4).

While some of these pieces are pretty good, and most feature a variety of voices, they all repeat Brown’s claim of ‘blanket speed reductions’ – and often in the headline. This is a huge mistake. The problem is, Simeon Brown is wrong. Not just wrong in my opinion, but wrong in regard to the facts.

So it was a relief yesterday to see NZH journalist Thomas Coughlan tackle this misinformation head-on, in an article headlined “Large majority of Kiwis want slower speeds, despite Government policy to raise them.” (Unfortunately the story is paywalled, although library patrons can see it via PressReader).

Coughlan presents the results of the most recent survey on public attitudes to speed limits and road safety:

A survey commissioned by NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi(NZTA) found Kiwis support lower speed limits around schools and other high-risk areas.

In some cases, that support was very strong, with 70% supporting lowering speed limits around schools to improve road safety.

That is despite the current Government forging ahead with plans to change the rules that have seen councils choose to lower speed limits around the country.

He includes this graph, which illustrates how a significant majority of people support reductions in high risk areas and around schools – and even a 30km/h urban limit had over 50% support, with only 24% opposing and 23% neutral on the subject.

Coughlan continues:

There is some controversy over just how “blanket” the former Government’s safer speed policy actually was, with proponents of the policy noting in many circumstances, councils could keep higher speeds outside schools if they felt it justified.

The Herald asked the Ministry of Transport to clarify the rules at 1pm yesterday, but despite being the agency in charge of overseeing the transport system, it was unable to provide a response by deadline.

Some councils have decided to oppose the Government’s changes, including Auckland Council, which voted 18-3 to oppose the Government’s plan to raise speed limits on the roads back to their levels at the start of 2020, and 12-11 to oppose the Government’s plan to allow “variable” speed limits around schools.

Several councillors said the minister had not provided evidence to support any of those claims. Instead, they cited a range of data they said showed his claims were wrong. They also said the new rule flew in the face of the Government’s commitment to allow local authorities to make local decisions.

Interestingly – because it confirms this aspect of the story isn’t going away any time soon – Russell Brown has a fresh piece in the NZ Listener along similar lines (also paywalled). Here’s a snippet:

If you can picture the Minister of Transport’s “astonished” face, that is what Simeon Brown was wearing after Auckland Council voted 18-3 to reject the government’s plan to wipe all speed limit reductions on the city’s roads since 2020. The vote does not mean Auckland Council – or any other local authority – can actually change what’s coming. Consultation on the new Setting of Speed Limits 2024 Rule is merely that: consultation.

Once it is in place, speed limits for most types of roads will increase and councils will be forbidden ever to reduce any of them, even at the request of local voters. The minister’s earlier promise that limits would increase only where it was “safe to do so” is undefined.

To be blunt, the Minister of Transport, Simeon Brown, alongside others in his coalition government, is weaponising language and fudging the facts. He’s mischaracterising a relatively popular, evidence-based policy as unfounded and unpopular “government overreach” – in order to force through his demonstrably unfounded and unpopular government overreach.

And he’s being helped by parts of the media regurgitating his catchphrases and accepting his framing.

Here are some facts on the changes Simeon wants to reverse.

• Changes proposed in 2022 were so uncontroversial that they only had 325 submissions over 9 weeks of consultation. While we don’t yet know how many thousands of submissions there have been on Brown’s proposed changes, he was clearly worried enough by the growing disquiet to take the unusual step of emailing National supporters urging them to submit on his plan.
• The most controversial part of the 2022 changes was that submitters wanted lower speeds implemented around schools sooner than proposed. Moreover, they thought 60km/h was too high around rural schools and wanted it lower.
• There is no ‘blanket’ approach in the 2022 changes (and the earlier 2020 shifts in policy). The well-supported rule explicitly gave local road controlling authorities (RCAs) and communities more control over speed limits in their areas – tasking them with developing locally tailored speed management plans based on evidence, in order to save lives.
• In fact, these 2022 changes finally gave RCAs the tools to move away from the prior ‘blanket approach’ on speed limits. For areas around schools, it meant that RCAs could consider variable or permanent speed limits, based on the local context and community. Given that in Auckland, 85% of crashes that cause deaths or serious injuries occur outside of school hours, of course some communities and authorities chose to implement permanent speed limits.

A key point of the 2022 rule was Proposal 10. This replaced ‘urban traffic areas’ with ‘speed limit areas’. Prior to 2022, ‘urban traffic areas’ mandated a default speed limit of 50km/h inside designated urban areas, with a default rural speed limit of 100km/h outside the area, unless specified or excluded.

The 2022 change gave RCAs much more flexibility to implement areas of any speed limit under a ‘speed limit area’. This was overwhelmingly supported, including by Winston Peters’ favourite advocacy group Grey Power, who said approvingly that the change: “should help to remove the idea of an urban default of 50km/h”.

So, if the 2022 legislation granted local RCAs more flexibility – local solutions to local issues on local streets – what are Simeon and the coalition government proposing?

A return to standardising 50km/h and 100km/h, with narrowly specific and mandatory standardised variable speed limits around schools. In other words, Simeon is the only one applying a blanket here.

The same goes for state highways. The Road to Zero safety strategy (which underpinned the 2022 changes) aimed to right-size speed limits on many state highways around Aotearoa. It wasn’t a blanket policy – the only reason that broad swathes of highways were under consideration is because 90% of our state highway network was set to unsafe speed limits.

To quote NZTA itself:

speed limits were first set before we knew what was safe and appropriate for our roads.

And as CEO Nicole Rosie told AA’s Directions magazine in 2022,

We have done speed assessments based on best-practice evidence of our networks and we know a lot of them are overscoped for the safety of that network.

[The changes] will genuinely be dependent on each community and each consultation. We are consulting on speed changes in many communities at the moment.

To take a few minutes longer driving more slowly from A to B, you’ll see quite dramatic safety improvements with minimal impact on productivity.

The changes made by NZTA after 2020 (which Simeon Brown’s rule explicitly intends to reverse, for no evidence-based reason) resulted in a range of reductions on different stretches of the state highway network, based on the context of each specific area, including the state of the road and the crash history.

And, while some reports described these reductions as ‘sweeping’, they only covered 4% of the state highway network. In Northland – the single case where a whole-region approach was proposed – NZTA steered away from region-wide limits after community feedback, to focus on specific locations instead. But even this didn’t mean Northland’s communities didn’t want safety measures – they very much did.

Everyone agrees roads need to be taken on a case-by-case basis. As the national road policing manager Steve Greally said in 2022:

…a 80km/h limit should be a maximum for undivided roads but this should drop to 60km/h for “windy, tortuous, or unsealed roads”

A flat 100km/h (or 80km/h or 60km/h and so on) doesn’t make sense, and you need to provide the option for bespoke limits that depend on the context of the road in question.

And that’s exactly what the 2022 speed rule did. The point was to implement evidence-based speeds on roads, so the rule offered flexibility, as all roads are different and need to be treated differently. This allowed local RCAs to adopt evidence-based reductions on their roads, especially around schools – on the basis that local people are best suited to make local decisions on local roads.

Whereas it seems this government only seems to like localism when locals agree with the government.

This is why so many Councils and schools across Auckland and the rest of the country have expressed dismay and opposition to Simeon Brown’s proposal. Aside from the immense waste of ratepayer and taxpayer money that it would take to reverse existing speed zones, the evidence simply does not back the claims for higher speeds.

In particular, economic analyses back safer speeds as the key to “productivity” – in large part because more children and adults being injured or dying in crashes, which simultaneously clog the network and weigh down the health system, in order to ostensibly “save” a few seconds off someone else’s trip, is not actually good for the economy. Who’d have thought?

It’s also shocking that a key disclaimer, which is right there in print in one of the two coalition agreements this government rests on, has been quietly disappeared from Simeon’s draft rule: the promise to only “reverse speed limit reductions where it is safe to do so.”* Close readers of the draft GPS will notice that same phrase vanished from the final GPS, too.

In other words, the Minister of Transport is effectively pledging to forcibly revert to higher speeds whether or not it is safe to do so. Is this why he wants everyone to think about blankets all the time, so we don’t spot what’s hiding in plain sight?

To sum up: the last government lifted a heavy blanket off New Zealanders – old-fashioned, un-evidenced speed-rules that were contributing to our horrendous road toll and costing us big-time, around $10bn a year, which is 4% of our GDP. The 2022 rule gave the power back to communities and local authorities, to work together to implement evidence-based speed limits, for safer streets and more transport choices, especially around schools..

In contrast: Simeon and the current coalition want to smother us with blanket speed increases rolled out over towns, cities and neighbourhoods, even those who object – especially around schools, where the plan is to impose one-size-fits-all, strictly time-limited conditions  – which all credible evidence shows will kill and maim New Zealanders.

Perhaps Simeon’s blankets will be useful to soak up the blood of those who will die if these changes are forced through? This is emotive language – but the increased risk is a point made by many level-headed experts, including former national Road Policing assistant commissioner Dave Cliff, who says:

Reversing life-changing speed-reduction measures and the planned approach to reversing speed limit reductions will not “boost productivity and economic growth” as claimed. It will increase the numbers killed and seriously injured.

The Australian College of Road Safety, referencing the current Government’s approach to speed, said it was ‘stepping back 20 years’. The college is right.

Returning to the theme I started with: the reporting around the speed-rule change should be a case study for journalism students in why and how not to swallow the bait.

We deserve due diligence, on this and all sorts of important changes underway right now. We should take any claim with a grain of salt – and always, always interrogate cute catchphrases. Avoid replicating metaphors, especially if politicians are spoon-feeding them to you with a view to headlines. A healthy dose of scepticism is the medicine for falsehoods and disinformation.

In the haste to deploy the buzzword “blanket” to what was in fact a nuanced and evidenced approach – thus uncritically reproducing the Minister’s framing in news stories – much (although thankfully not all) of the media coverage missed the real story: the dangerous reality of the proposed replacement. But this does not need to continue.

This is really important, because the way things are framed, and what is presented as ‘fact’, has enormous implications for how we all think about problems and what the needed solutions may be. In this case, if these policy changes go through, people will die who otherwise needn’t have.

Finally, even if you’re heartily sick of the discourse about speed limits, don’t think you’ve heard the end of it. As yesterday’s story shows, the Minister may have assumed this was a populist slam-dunk and yet it will continue to bounce back in his face. And I’m pretty sure his blanket won’t help him.

Header image via Pinterval, CC BY-NC 4.0

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