State highway safety improvements welcomed

Associate Transport Minister Simon Bridges has welcomed new risk-ratings that show significant improvements in the safety of New Zealand’s state highway network, at the launch of the latest KiwiRAP road assessment results today in the Bay of Plenty.

KiwiRAP (New Zealand Road Assessment Programme) measures crash risk on nearly 11,000 kilometres of state highway, identifying high-risk roads to help target safety improvements.

“Improving the safety of roads and roadsides is a top priority in Safer Journeys.  One of the main actions we have in this area is a focus on improving safety on high risk rural roads,” says Mr Bridges.

“It is great to see that the latest KiwiRAP results show a drop of more than 15 per cent in fatal and serious injury crashes on state highways.

“KiwiRAP is proving to be a very effective tool to help identify the level of risk on these roads so that engineering, investment and enforcement efforts can be better targeted to the risk each road poses.”

Mr Bridges says the Government’s Roads of National Significance (RoNS) programme is also a major contributor to improving state highway safety.

“Every one of the RoNS has or will have a 4-star KiwiRAP rating, providing a high degree of safety for road users. A number of the rural RoNS will bypass sections of 2 to 3-star roads which carry high volumes of traffic and have a high crash risk.”

Mr Bridges acknowledged the work the NZ Transport Agency, the Automobile Association, the Ministry of Transport, the Police and the ACC in producing the risk maps.

“This collaboration is a great example of what can be achieved by working together.  While continuing to improve road safety is on-going, KiwiRAP is already being put to great use to creating safer journeys for all New Zealanders.”

For more information go to http://www.kiwirap.org.nz/