The long winding & road
Overseas visitors to New Zealand love getting behind the wheel. But while the business is driving the Kiwi dollar, it comes at a cost, writes Dave Nicoll.
‘Welcome to Smash Palace,’’ says Te Anau Mobil garage owner Mark Dowling as he gestures to several dozen wrecked cars in a yard.
Some are rental cars, but the majority are uninsured second-hand cars bought by tourists.
Te Anau lies at the start of the Milford Rd, which stretches all the way to Milford Sound in the heart of the Fiordland National Park.
Along with its reputation as being one of the most stunning drives in New Zealand, Milford Rd is becoming almost as well know for the high number of crashes involving overseas drivers.
Last week German backpackers Tristan Melzner and Lucas Leschok were killed when their car reportedly crossed the centre line and collided with a bus coming the other way, bursting into flames.
While fiery fatal crashes attract a lot of attention, Dowling, who has been towing cars for 20 years, says there are a lot more road accidents that go unreported.
‘‘I towed a German teenager in last night, broken down not smashed, and he got his licence 10 days before he came here,’’ he says.
The teenager’s only real driving experience was limited to what he had done to get his licence back home. He then came here and managed to buy a car, even though he was clearly an inexperienced driver.
Residents along the renowned route are becoming fed up with crashes involving distracted tourist drivers, and want to know what it will take to improve driver behaviour.
They say there’s nothing wrong with the road itself. It’s well maintained and while it has its challenges, being an alpine road, the fault lies with those behind the wheel.
Traffic data revealed that 124,000 vehicles passed through the Homer Tunnel in 2013. Last year, that number increased to 164,000.
Tourists generally travel on tour buses or rent vehicles in either Christchurch or Queenstown to make their way to the Sound, as Te Anau is the closest town.
Te Anau Kiwi Holiday Park owner Anna Molloy says they try to encourage guests to go on buses instead of by car.
‘‘We try and sell them a coach rather than a cruise by saying the driver can have a break as well.’’
What scares Molloy is that some of the tourists arrive in New Zealand and pick up a big campervan from Queenstown before going on the open road in a vehicle they have no experience in.
The latest accident prompted Molloy to raise the issue of driver safety at the South Island branch meeting of the Holiday Accommodation Parks Association of New Zealand.
She asked the association what they could do to educate drivers, even though the issue was being investigated at a government level.
Molloy says there are, for example, opportunities to play educational videos about driving safety in the reception areas of hotels and other types of accommodation.
Stories of near misses and bad driving behaviour are so common for many of those who work on the road or in Milford Sound that they often aren’t mentioned.
The manager for Te Anau-based bus and coach company TrackNet, Nepia Tauri, 30, becomes concerned about his buses every time he hears the town’s volunteer fire brigade siren go off.
But Tauri, who has worked for the company for eight years, doesn’t believe every tourist driver is a bad driver. It’s the crazy itineraries they have, and they underestimate the time it takes to get from point A to B, he says.
One such example was an American group he met who had been kayaking for 12 hours. They planned to drive to Milford Sound the next day and back to Christchurch to drop off their rental car before flying out.
According to Tauri this is a classic example of how people over-exert themselves.
‘‘They’re in an unfamiliar place, driving an unfamiliar vehicle . . . they’re not used to the New Zealand conditions, the New Zealand roads.’’
There’s no doubt the Fiordland National Park is a world-class destination.
But Tauri questions if it has worldclass infrastructure.
‘‘It really does need some investment, that road. You think about the traffic volume that’s on it now, the traffic volume is increasing.’’
Tauri also believes rental car companies have a role to play in keeping everyone safe on the roads.
‘‘We know a lot of the problem drivers come from people renting cars.’’
In recent years rental car companies have introduced a policy of cancelling contracts when notified of poor driving. Although this is a step in the right direction, is it enough?
In 2014, Indian tourist Niraj Bajaj was fined $500 and disqualified from driving for nine months after he was found to be driving so dangerously that he left a trail of motorists nearly crashing to get out of his path, near the Devil’s Staircase in the Southern Lakes District.
Bajaj told police he was trying to catch his 3pm boat at Milford Sound.
New Zealand Transport Authority director of regional relations Jim Harland says changes have already been made to southern roads.
Yellow no-passing lines have been painted, centre-line rumble strips were added and warning signs were installed.
Harland is also the chair of the Visiting Drivers Project, a collaborative effort between 14 different agencies to improve road safety for visiting drivers.
He says driver education messages are played on international Air New Zealand flights and when cars are rented.
‘‘We know 69 per cent of visiting tourists will self-drive on their trip,’’ says Harland, who believes our roads are ‘‘different’’.
Tourism New Zealand’s corporate affairs general manager Deborah Gray says there is no single response that can resolve this issue, nor any single agency that can take the sole responsibility.
Communication works only if the message is received and understood. It doesn’t replace experience nor does it get people to slow down.
The agency has been part of the Visiting Drivers Signature Programme since its inception in 2014.
Back in Te Anau, garage owner Dowling points to a wrecked Nissan that was pulled out of a ditch between Manapouri and Te Anau.
The German who was driving it was ‘‘lucky’’, given the car landed upside down in the ditch with part of it underwater.
The crash happened on a perfectly straight piece of road.
He knows of tourists who attempt driving from Mt Cook to Milford and then onto Queenstown in a single night, more than 10 hours of driving.
Dowling doesn’t believe that a park and ride system to travel to the Sound will work, as this will only deter people from coming.
He says no amount of intervention would help as the majority of the crashes are due to bad driving.
‘‘I’ve never been to an accident where they were going too slow,’’ he says.
It really does need some investment, that road. You think about the traffic volume that’s on it now, the traffic volume is increasing. Nepia Tauri