Road safety should be a priority

National is determined to put more lives at risk as it again proves that it doesn’t take road safety seriously, says Labour’s Transport Safety spokesperson Iain Lees-Galloway.

“Funding for road safety promotion has been slashed by 11% in the National Land Transport Programme 2012-15.   And what is more, road policing has also been cut while funding for other activities that will improve road safety has not kept pace with inflation.

“But it gets even worse.  At the same time Government is happily pushing more freight on to the roads while doing nothing to encourage the use of rail, which is proven to be much safer than road travel.

“Sadly it is clear that National is prepared to put drivers’ lives at risk in order to pump more and more money into its blinkered Roads of National Significance policy.

“Today’s announcement comes hard on the heels of National’s failure to act on the legal blood alcohol level, hiding data about the prevalence of drug-driving from the Cabinet and refusing to do anything about the disproportionate number of accidents involving trucks.

“As we see so often from National, Minister Simon Bridges can only see the savings of short term spending cuts, not the long term damage he is doing by making our roads unsafe,” says Iain Lees-Galloway.