Community road safety

Road Safety Week

We partner with lots of local organisations to bring you Whangārei’s Road Safety Week. 

Road Safety Week is an annual, week-long community event. It’s promoted by the road-safety charity Brake, but events are run by respective councils and communities throughout New Zealand.

In 2025, Road Safety Week runs Monday 12 to Sunday 18 May, and we’ll be calling on everyone to be a road-safety hero, particularly by looking out for people walking and cycling. We’ll have more event details soon.

Community events 

As well as Road Safety Week, we raise awareness about road safety in fun and informative ways at community events throughout the year. 

Look out for the road-safety team at events, including the A&P Show, Touch A Truck and Emergency Services Day. 

Keen to see the road-safety team at your event? 

Email us: RoadSafetyEducation@wdc.govt.nz 

Fatigue stops

The fatigue ‘driver reviver’ stops set up at Uretiti prior to public holidays are also supported by our team, in partnership with Fulton Hogan and other organisations. 

These rest stops help refresh drivers travelling long distances, providing them and their passengers with coffee and food, paired with road-safety messages.

Northland Road Safety Trust programmes

We contract Northland Road Safety Trust to deliver several programmes and initiatives throughout the community, including: 

• Drive SOBA – The Drive SOBA Programme (DSP) is an evidence-based drink-driving programme designed to reduce recidivist drink-driving. 
• SAID – Stop Alcohol Impaired Driving – The focus of the SAID programme is on reducing drink-driving by providing education around alcohol, alcohol impairment and drink-driving. 
• RYDA – Rotary Young Driver Awareness – The overarching theme of the RYDA workshop is ‘My Life – My Choices’. The programme aims to reduce road trauma through attitude and behavioural change, and, at the same time, contribute to the totality of community and government road-safety messages. 
• DID – Drug Impaired Driving – A course specifically focused on drug-driving that addresses the justifications that contribute to continued drug-driving behaviour. DID focuses on facts, and the effects of common drugs and their impact on driving. This is preparing for saliva testing that will be coming in at the end of 2025.
• SADD – Students Against Dangerous Driving – Northland Road Safety Trust provides funding and support for SADD to reach high schools across Whangārei and Kaipara. 
• Child restraints – This is a Plunket-based programme in Whangārei and Kaipara districts that provides child-restraint checks and installation of car seats in vehicles by a qualified technician from Plunket. 
• Drive Smarta – Drive Smarta is designed to create behavioural change in drivers demonstrating high speed and other socially deviant driving behaviours. The aim of the Drive Smarta course is to reduce the incidence of speeding and dangerous driving by providing a specific programme targeted at offenders. 
• Young driver licensing programmes – Northland Road Safety Trust currently has six community-based driver licensing programmes in Whangārei and Kaipara districts. These programmes offer learner-licensing courses and provide mentored driving support to anyone in the community who wants or needs it. 

Our Road Safety Engineers investigate areas where the crash risk is high and oversee physical improvements on the roading network to improve safety.

Potential road improvements include:

• traffic calming, e.g. speed humps and raised tables
• crossing facilities
• intersection upgrades
• speed management.

Wherever possible, we must provide fit-for-purpose infrastructure to allow for all types of transport choices in urban areas.

We design and build for human vulnerability, and encourage and promote safer choices and safer behaviour on our roads.

This means improving the safety, connectivity and accessibility of street networks to encourage travel by walking, cycling and public transport.

For school runs, trips to the shops and local destinations – all the shorter trips – walking and cycling are the most efficient options.

Riding your bike to the shops means one less car on the road and one less carpark needed. Everyone wins because active transport is congestion-busting!

We have a small network of count cameras that monitor the number of cycle and pedestrian movements all day, every day. These cameras do not store any images.

The data collected is used for a variety of reasons including:

• identifying trends in cycling and walking
• guiding policy and investment in active modes
• reporting the use of the shared path network. 

The data doesn’t lie – more and more people are getting out and about on foot and by bike on our shared paths. 

We’re aware that there are some concerns about antisocial behaviour in certain hotspots and we’re working with the community safety team (along with several community partners) to monitor and address these. 

BikeReady cycle skills

Bike Northland is contracted to deliver BikeReady cycle skills training at schools throughout Whangārei, so our tamariki know how to cycle safely. 

School patrol

We support our School Community Officers by making sure our schools have appropriate school crossing facilities so they can run school patrols safely. 

School travel planning 

School travel planning looks at ways to reduce congestion at the school gate and make it safer for children walking, cycling or scooting to school.

In 2024, we ran a school travel planning pilot with Onerahi Primary School and Whangārei Intermediate School, creating tailored action plans and travel map brochures for both schools. 

We’ll be using our learnings to create a wider school travel planning programme and to run a Walk or Wheel to School week in Term 3.

Is your school interested in signing up for school travel planning?

Email us: RoadSafetyEducation@wdc.govt.nz