Russian roulette on road
In the third part of our Dying to Get There series, Leighton Keith looks at what it’s like to drive on a notoriously dangerous stretch of State Highway 3.
Peter Bingham plays Russian roulette every time he gets in his car and leaves his house.
The New Plymouth communications advisor’s dice with death comes just metres from his home, as he pulls out from a side road onto State Highway 3 near Waitara.
‘‘In the morning and in the evening, at peak hour, it’s a little bit Russian roulettey to be fair.
‘‘It can be frustrating. There can be a line of 10 to 12 cars waiting to pull out of Raleigh St on to the main road at peak times, and it just leads to anxiety and frustration for drivers waiting in the line. And I would suggest that happens at a lot of other intersections, particularly the 3A intersection.’’
In 2014, the New Zealand Transport Agency ranked the intersection Bingham must use every day as the 64th most dangerous in the country.
Once he gets past that Bingham’s journey into New Plymouth also passes the eighth worst, where the highway intersects with Mangati Rd, just north of Bell Block. About two kilometres north of Raleigh St is the country’s 18th most dangerous intersection, at SH3 and Princess St.
Once described by police as a ‘‘killing field’’ the stretch of highway on which Bingham has driven each day for the past 37 years is well known as an unforgiving ribbon of injury and death. The 12 kilometres between New Plymouth and Waitara includes 12 uncontrolled intersections, and is a mish-mash of 100kmh and 80kmh speed limits.
It is Taranaki’s busiest stretch of highway, on which 12 people have died in the last decade, and countless others have been seriously injured. While the New Zealand Transport Agency has plans to upgrade the highway, the changes are not happening fast enough, Bingham says.
‘‘There will be more deaths on this stretch of highway before anything gets done.’’
The latest death happened on August 28, when Olivia Renee Keightley-Trigg, 18, was killed in a head-on crash on Big Jim’s hill, just south of the highway’s intersection with Nelson St, Waitara. A month before that, 19-year-old Kyle William John Sullivan, better known as Kyle Love, died in in the two-car collision on State Highway 3, a short distance from where Keightley-Trigg died.
In 2012, the NZTA banned right turns out of Mangati Rd, and reduced the speed limit imposed at Princess St to 80kmh in 2013.
The speed limit, between Mangati Rd Bell Block and Mahoetahi Rd near Brixton, was reduced to 80kmh in December 2013, and two passing lanes were also removed.
While Bingham says these changes have helped, he wants to see NZTA get to work on the longawaited safety improvements sooner rather than later.
‘‘I just think it is a disgrace that they haven’t done anything more, all they’ve done is lower the speed limit.
‘‘It’s a risk road, there’s no doubt about it. I’m not the only one, there’s a lot of people out this way that are incredibly frustrated at the apparent lack of action.
‘‘We can hear the Waitara fire brigade’s siren from my place, on Tate Rd, and every time it goes you just wonder whether it’s another prang at one of the problem intersections or a fire.’’
He believes the solution is simple and has been shown to work in other areas.
‘‘All you do is put in roundabouts and you solve the problem overnight — it doesn’t take four years to work out how to go through the process of putting in roundabouts.
‘‘If it was any other country in the world they would have been done in six months.’’