On politics, professional ethics, and premature death on our roads
Today's guest post is an open letter by Dr Bridget Doran, a transportation engineer, researcher, and human factors psychologist, on the question of politics and professional ethics in the context of the new Speed Rule.
It's a timely read for our local audience. Auckland Transport is set to undo safe speeds on over 1500 streets across the city. AT believes that under the Speed Rule, it has no option but to do so, wherever a school was mentioned as one of any number of reasons for speed reductions. Tomorrow is the deadline for notifying to NZTA the streets where speeds will rise.
The scale of the impacts already makes AT the odd man out amongst urban road-controlling authorities, and it's looking like even more of an outlier given other cities like Hamilton and Dunedin have found a way to keep safe speeds in neighbourhoods, even when schools were mentioned during consultation with communities. (This more rational approach, as we've previously covered, appears to have Ministerial favour.)
Yesterday, advocates reminded the AT Board that it has options, and urged AT to review its approach to the rule and work with the Minister, on behalf of communities that strongly wish to keep their safe speeds. As a result, the chair of the board, Richard Leggat, undertook to write to Minister Chris Bishop seeking clarification of what's possible.
However, AT's CEO Dean Kimpton did not seem prepared to reconsider AT's approach, nor keen to review the list of streets slated for higher speeds – even though he has publicly stated that AT opposes these speed reversals. This raises the spectre of international ridicule. If AT misses this opportunity to defend safe speeds, will it have to return the global road safety prize it was recently awarded for the very programme it is about to dismantle?
Meanwhile, the same dangerous predicament is playing out across the country, to the great dismay of schools, communities, local councils and elected representatives including Government MPs. This legislation is an ethical fork in the road for every road-controlling authority and for the Minister in charge, who will have to carry the consequences. And, as Bridget writes below, the harm it causes extends to every professional involved.
Of course, this could all be resolved – and lives saved – by commonsense amendments to the Speed Rule. Watch this space.
Open Letter: To the media, the Transportation Group of Engineering NZ, and Engineering NZ
This is not a formal complaint or note, rather a discussion of an emerging dangerous precedent where politics and professional integrity are clashing, with public lives at stake.
In the more than 20 years I’ve worked as a civil engineer in New Zealand, I’ve never seen so blatant a disregard for professional practice as is unfolding in our transportation sector right now.
Like thousands of my peers, I’m a member of Engineering New Zealand, an independent non-profit member organisation that exists to support and regulate the profession. Part of its regulating function is to grant and administer professional charterships. All Members, whether Chartered or not, are required to commit each year to a Code of Ethical Conduct. We tick a box in an online form that says we commit to a variety of standards including acting competently, behaving appropriately, and maintaining confidentiality.
So far, so generic. But it’s another of eight standards listed in the code - ‘Report adverse consequences’ – that has rocked my professional world recently.
Now, the Code of Ethics doesn’t come up in most engineers’ careers as something to be held to. That’s mostly because, first, professionals typically do their best to act ethically, and second, every engineering decision is necessarily a trade-off between social, environmental, economic and technical constraints. If it weren’t, then it wouldn’t need to be ‘engineered’ in the first place. Engineering is about doing a good job given constraints. There is always judgment involved. Best practice evolves, so we draw on guidance, the advice of our colleagues, and depending on the project, on the expertise of multi-disciplinary teams to reach reasonable engineering design decisions.
In my practice area of transportation, as well as technical constraints there are social and political ones, perhaps more often than there are for, say, geotechnical or electrical engineering. That’s because transport necessarily interacts with human geography, with placemaking, with land development, and with a host of other factors that are not even part of the built environment. While structural engineers can draw a bubble around their beam and its loads, discounting the world beyond their design space, transportation engineers can’t really do that. Our design loads are humans, within and outside of vehicles controlled by them - and our design spaces are not surveyed boundaries, but cities and countryside.
And there’s a human factor to the outcomes of our decisions. If snow falls on a roof in Invercargill and the roof collapses, an engineer could be asked what design assumptions they made about their building. They can be clearly held to account if the roof fails under a predictable weight of snow. But if a child runs across a street and a driver within the speed limit fails to react in time to avoid colliding with them, an engineer is not as directly accountable for the ‘failure’ of their design in delivering a safe outcome. Some would argue that they should be more responsible, but there are clearly subjective trade-offs in transportation that don’t exist in structural engineering. It’s complex.
But until 2025, I was somewhat okay with holding this balance in my head, because the bottom line has always been that we must only consider the adverse consequences that might come from design, and ‘take reasonable steps to safeguard the health and safety of people’. If those people then did irrational things – while in control of a motor vehicle, for example – then the design is not necessarily at fault.
This year however, it appears that some of my peers may have neglected this requirement to ‘take reasonable steps’ in safeguarding public health.
The New Zealand Transport Agency, under instruction from the Ministry of Transport, has stated on public record that it will increase speed limits on public roads without considering safety.* That is, even though increased speed limits lead to increased travel speeds, and even though increased travel speeds lead to increased risk of serious injury and death (with no change to infrastructure or vehicle composition or the underlying average competence of the road-using public), the Agency is not considering safety because the Setting of Speed Limits Rule explicitly prohibits it.
In this case there is not a single Member of Engineering New Zealand to be held to account.
I don’t blame anyone at the NZ Transport Agency for doing their job under duress. But this is such an unusual situation and dangerous precedent, it deserves discussion as a profession and society: how can we reasonably protest the removal of our obligation to consider health and safety in the course of our work? How can we protect the credibility of our professional peers and colleagues in this climate where dissent could reasonably have disastrous career consequences for an individual, but compliance could reasonably result in premature death of members of the public?
The murky waters of professional ethics and credibility mean that we need to find firm ground outside of them. It’s as a profession and community that we need to stand up and make our disappointment clear. Hence this strongly worded letter.
Bridget Doran
CMEngNZ, BE(hons), MET, PhD
*Gisborne clubs protest State Highway 35 speed boost. Zita Campbell, Gisborne Herald, 27 April 2025
In March, Local Democracy Reporting received an email thread between a resident and Gisborne District Council asset planning manager Tina Middlemiss, who had gathered data from NZTA's Crash Analysis System (CAS).
There was a 64 percent reduction in crashes from the five years before to the five years after the speed limit was reduced from 100 to 80km/h on 8 September 2020, for the stretch of road that underwent consultation, Middlemiss wrote.
"So by increasing the speed limit from 80 back up to 100km/h, it would reason that there would be almost triple the risk of crashes and harm occurring."
Minister of Transport Chris Bishop's office was approached for comment on whether this data was factored into the decision to reverse the speed limit back to 100km/h.
The question was deferred to NZTA.
NZTA director of regional relationships Linda Stewart said under the rule, NZTA was required to undertake consultation to demonstrate "public acceptance", defined as majority public support. This was the only factor NZTA could take into account in its decision-making.
See also:
Disregarding safety in raising speed limits is 'highly unusual' - transport agency. Jonathan Milne, Newsroom, 24 April 2025
“Demonstrating ‘public acceptance’ is the only decision-making factor for retaining the existing speed limit,” [the NZTA report] says. “This is highly unusual … Other factors, including safety or technical guidance, are normally weighted alongside consultation feedback to determine the outcome of a speed review.”Increased speed limit brings fear for New Plymouth mayor. Glen McLean, Taranaki Daily News, 25 April 2025
“Speaking to our emergency services personnel, we know that since the speed limit between Waitara and Bell Block was dropped to 80kph serious injury accidents have reduced by more than 60%,” Holdom said.
“Too many people have been killed or seriously injured on this killer section of highway, which is why Government is spending more than $80 million on safety upgrades.
“So I’m struggling with the logic of an organisation which claims to be focused on safety, making a decision which its own data shows will absolutely increase the number of serious injury accidents in our community.”Speed limit increases on SH1 will risk safety – Horowhenua Mayor. Nick James, RNZ, 27 April 2025Horowhenua Mayor Bernie Wanden told RNZ he was disappointed."By looking at those that submitted community voice has been largely ignored, it is road users that have held the sway."
Wanden said the consultation was purely based on the number of submissions -- not factors such as safety.
He said there had been no deaths or serious injuries on State Highway 1 between Ōhau and Manakau since the speed limit had been reduced.
"Now we are going back to 100km/h which I think is only going to increase the risk of more accidents and therefore deaths and serious injuries."