Safer speeds in Ōpōtiki District

We want Ōpōtiki to be a place where people can safely get where they need to be on our local roads whether they are driving to work, making deliveries, walking for health, biking to school or scootering to friends. When our roads are safe, we have happier and healthier lives.

Ōpōtiki district has poor crash statistics. The risk of death or serious injury to an individual driving on a road in Ōpōtiki is higher than most other districts and cities in Aotearoa and we should not accept the loss of life and injuries as normal.

Research shows that there are many ways we can make our roads safer and bring our road toll down. Safer cars and safer drivers, clear enforcement of rules and better roads and infrastructure. But the biggest and most cost effective tool we have available to us is to ensure that the vehicles are travelling at speeds that are safe and appropriate to the roads and users around them.

Councils are required to work together in their regions to develop a Regional Speed Management plan. This speed management plan will set a 10-year plan (2024 to 2034) to implement safe speed limits, construct road safety infrastructure and enforce speeds with traffic safety cameras across the Bay of Plenty.

If councils want to make any speed limit changes between now and 2024, they will need to develop an Interim Speed Management Plan. Here in the Ōpōtiki district, we have developed an Interim Speed Management Plan so we can make some changes to speeds around our school and kura and other key locations.

Recent activity

We have developed our Interim Speed Management Plan.

Waka Kotahi (managers of the State Highway road network) are also undertaking this work, and began consultation on their interim speed management plan in late 2022.

A target under speed limit setting legislation is to implement safer speed limits around schools. 40% of schools are required to be completed by 2024, and 100% by 2027. This focus on schools forms a large part of our Interim Speed Management Plan.

Before adopting our plan we reached out to key stakeholders, our iwi partners, schools and kura, for early discussions. We then put our draft plan out for public consultation. The feedback period for that has now closed but you can still read about it here: Interim Speed Management Plan consultation. On the 1st of August 2023, council deliberated and adopted the plan in full, approving safer speeds around the network. The plan was sent to the director of land transport for certification. The plan was certified on 20 September 2023.

View a copy of the adopted certified Ōpōtiki District Interim Speed Management Plan PDF

Future activities

Regional Speed Management Plan

Development of the Regional speed management plan is expected to start June 2023 and we will follow a similar process to the Interim plan, reaching out to key stakeholders first and then conducting consultation with the broader community.

We’ll then feed this information to our partners at the Bay of Plenty Regional Council, who will merge Speed management plans from all councils into the Regional Plan.

The goal will be to have the Regional Speed management Plan developed and adopted by the end of 2023.

Any changes that can’t fit into the Interim Speed Management Plan will be put forward in the Regional plan.