Highway a ‘dog’s breakfast’
The Dying to Get There series tells stories from the notoriously dangerous stretch of State Highway 3 between New Plymouth and Waitara. Leighton Keith reports.
Neil Holdom can’t stand by while the road he travels to work on each day continues to claim lives of his fellow commuters.
The New Plymouth mayor has gone straight to transport minister Phil Twyford asking when improvements will be made to the section of State Highway 3 he describes as a ‘‘dog’s breakfast’’ of visual distractions and clogged intersections that is no longer fit for purpose.
‘‘We can’t have a person getting killed on that highway every year,’’ he says.
‘‘Realistically it’s a combination of underinvestment historically, because they have been talking about roundabouts for a decade I think, and traffic volumes have just increased markedly.
‘‘Particularly it has been really noticeable in the last five years,’’ he says.
Once described by police as a ‘‘killing field’’, the stretch of SH3 between New Plymouth and Waitara is well known as an unforgiving ribbon of injury and death and Holdom isn’t alone in wanting changes made.
The 12 kilometres between New Plymouth and Waitara include 12 uncontrolled intersections, three of which make the country’s 100 most-dangerous list.
A mish-mash of 100kph and 80kph 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. Holdom says the highway is not fit for purpose and had not been designed to cope with the volumes it was now experiencing.
‘‘Modern engineering, modern
systems need to be designed to allow for human error.
‘‘I’m not a roading engineer but I know really it’s pretty common sense. We need some roundabouts.’’
His safety concerns reflect the feeling in the community, he says, and work was urgently required to reduce the unacceptable road toll.
‘‘I think tons of people feel exactly the same way as me and it’s just not safe.
‘‘That’s a death a year so there’s a whole bunch of families dealing with that, but then how many other serious injury accidents are there?’’
In August Holdom wrote an open letter to transport minister Phil Twyford lamenting the lack of action to address safety concerns and questioning when the diggers would get rolling.
Holdom has also contacted the New Zealand Transport Agency seeking details on whether Taranaki was getting its fair share of investment in its roads.
‘‘I don’t think we do, but I’m asking the questions. In the meantime the government is just pouring all of this money into all of these other areas and we are losing a person a year.’’
Since Holdom wrote his letter to Twyford the men had spoken on the telephone, a meeting has been arranged in Wellington for September and he hopes Twyford will visit the region before Christmas to see the problems first hand.
He hoped building a relationship with the minister could help streamline the process with the NZTA or at least provide some clarity on its position.
‘‘I just want NZTA to be transparent and to tell us when they can do it and if there’s the ability to fast track these things, and if not why not,’’ he says.
‘‘I want to find who are these decision makers and what basis are they making these decisions on and where is the accountability to the community.
‘‘Who are these decision makers because I want to look them in the eye and get them to explain their thinking.’’