Evaluating the impact of ‘Speed Kills Kids’ campaign in New Zealand schools.

Speed is a major contributor to the incidence and severity of road crashes. While this is a generic problem across the road system, speeding in and around school zones is of concern owing to the large volumes of vehicle and pedestrian traffic at certain times of the day, and the presence of significant numbers of children and young people; for example, between 2004-06, and between the hours of 7:30-9:00am and 3:00-4:30pm, almost 1500 injury crashes were recorded within 250m of New Zealand schools (Ministry of Transport, 2008).
In attempts to counter this problem, in February 2006, New Zealand Police introduced its innovative ‘Speed Kills Kids’ campaign. The aim of this initiative was to reduce the incidence of speeding in school zones, through enforcing at lower speed tolerance levels, and to reduce the number of resulting injuries and fatalities associated with this problem.