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Tourist drivers
There is a sign near the Queenstown Airport, ‘‘plan your journey, New Zealand roads are different’’ or words to that effect.
New Zealand roads are different. They are narrow, twisty, poorly surfaced and rough in a lot of cases.
They require close attention as there are few safe places to pull over in this area, and deep drains and drop-offs are common.
Just outside the perimeter of Queenstown Airport, the largest industry by far is the car rental companies.
Every day they turn hundreds of tourists loose in mainly large SUV-type vehicles to travel and see the sights of this popular area.
I suppose they have the appropriate licences, valid credit cards and have signed the insurance clauses etc.
A lot of these now mobile tourists travel the roads to the Top of the Lake to visit Middle Earth and Hobbit country.
Here they encounter some problems.
Slow vehicle bays, narrow road sections around cliffs, one-lane bridges, narrow gravel roads, roundabouts, extreme cambers and crowns, creek fords, and other motorists, to name just a few.
In their defenve, these obstacles must seem quite daunting, compounded by the fact that possibly in their home environment they may drive on the opposite side of the road, and they may not be able to read signs in English.
In Australia at least, and I suspect here in New Zealand, it is illegal to have a TV screen in a vehicle that is visible from the driver’s position.
However, a lot of our foreign guests have a large GPS screens stuck in the middle of the windscreen and their eyes remain glued to it.
I have followed them considerable distances, usually at a very slow and variable pace and they very seldom look in rearvision mirrors etc.
I believe this is one reason many of them veer across the centre line on right-hand bends: when the road on the GPS goes right, they automatically follow with the steering wheel.
This causes some concern when our road widths are minimal to begin with.
I doubt any Glenorchy local of driving age has not had an encounter with a tourist coming at them head on either partially or fully on the wrong side of the road.
Sign language and light flashing generally work on straight pieces but the results on blind corners can and do end in head-on collisions.
The major accidents make the news, but the near misses and lucky escapes do not.
In the past two weeks, we have had three roll-overs on the same bitumen right-hand bend, with three lucky escapes, one fullfrontal into a roadside culvert, resulting in a helicopter airlift, and a nasty encounter with the abutment on a one-lane bridge (about 4m wide).
The local volunteer emergency services have had more callouts in January than the whole of 2016.
This compared with news in the media that tourists numbers from one large country are way down on last year means these people appear to be somewhat overrepresented in statistics relating to crashes involving tourists.
Is it not time certain organisations started taking some preventive measures to curb a disturbing trend?
Or do we have to wait until the seemingly inevitable multi-death horror smash occurs?
We are encouraged to ring the *555 number and report the above, but this has two setbacks.
Phone coverage is one, the other is the fact the police dutifully dispatch a car to find the offender (and usually do catch up with them, being there is only one way to and from Glenorchy) but they are powerless to put the driver off the road unless they are seen by the officer to be breaking the law.
The officer can only suggest if they continue to drive the way they have been, they may kill themselves or their passengers.
Only the hire car companies can tear up the rental agreements.
Would it not be a start in the right direction if all car renters had to watch a short video showing roundabouts, slow bay procedures etc before they set forth from the hire company yards?
Failing some positive actions, I can see a fully loaded truck or bus and a tourist family having a terminal encounter very soon on this road, J C Waddell Glenorchy