Alternative headline: National to spend $30m to sacrifice some of your lives so our trip is slightly faster.
The changes have been endorsed by transport researchers and street safety advocates as effective measures to help reduce the number of Kiwis killed and injured on the roads.
That’s all there is to it.
One problem NZ has is that things are far away from each other, and it’s mountainous.
That means we spend a lot more time driving long distance than people in The Netherlands, and this driving is largely on long, windy, poor quality roads. The roads are poor quality because we need so many of them compared to the population.
We have less than 20 people per km^2, vs The Netherland’s 500+.
Yep true, think my comparison is not entirely fair. Also, in NL the taxes are a lot higher; e.g. road tax / month for a petrol car is what we pay here per YEAR, diesel cars are even more expensive. Plus, there’s an additional tax on new vehicles.