Chicanepictures.com

Bus crash

Another major bus crash on the Milford Rd, are there more road accidents on this stretch of road than elsewhere in New Zealand?

Several days ago I had the pleasure of driving to Te Anau to Milford Sound return, it is still a great road trip. Having spent the past 45 years attending motor vehicle accidents on State Highway 94 Mossburn to Milford Sound. It was pleasure to travel in my own vehicle and watch other drivers as much as enjoy the scenery.

Most drivers were good and the only frustrations I encountered was with people driving at 65kmh, this is an unavoidable experience on any highway. The road has certainly changed in the past 50 years. The contractor that maintains the road does an excellent job considering the environment and weather.

With the exceptions of several narrow sections of the highway and one lane bridges the road is like most state highways in New Zealand. Some years ago members of the fire brigade, at their own expense wished to use the large wall of the fire station to advertise road safety messages to people travelling to Milford Sound.

We were going to use seasonal messages to encourage driver awareness. This project was soon forgotten about as both local and central government bureaucracy had the project in the two hard basket. Don’t want to distract drivers do we.

I like the ideal of more layby areas, but people need a reason to stop. The majority have a schedule to keep and don’t really appreciate the time required to complete the journey safely. Maybe the Department of Conservation could make more areas available in their plans for the future where more mobile coffee vans could be set up or even small mobile food outlets.

With the bypass road to Milford on most GPSs, vehicles are now showing the quickest way to Milford Sound. How many people are not stopping in Te Anau to revive from the journey from Queenstown? Do the pay toilets in Te Anau also mean people are not stopping in the town? Interested in the comments about how the powers that be, may try and manage traffic volumes and flows, it is a state highway.

Should the option of pay and ride from Te Anau become cheaper or free, could the Milford Development Levy be altered to help pay for this option? Most vehicles are stopping for the lights at the Homer Tunnel, could all drivers be approached and given advise or a leaflet of basic road safety in New Zealand driving conditions? Maybe we could shock travellers by leaving all the crashed vehicles on the side of the highway as a reminder of what can happen if you don’t drive safely.

All of these questions need looking at to encourage people to enjoy their holiday and come home safely.

The hardest thing for the road safety authorities to teach drivers is patience and how do you teach stupid? Graeme Humphries QSM Te Anau

Exploration debate

Oil exploration New Zealand’s Mr Madgwick pretends his ‘‘science’’ behind oil exploration in the south is infallible.

Real science, (agreed on by 97 per cent of scientists) states that adding more carbon to the atmosphere is heading down a disastrous path, a fact known since the 70s.

The ‘‘we are just looking, no harm in that’’ theory is contradicted by agreements that allow forced rights to extraction once discovery has been made.

A few reasons not to pursue oil exploration in the south:

the already perilous state of our southern waterways and the oil industries international history of water pollution, are risks we do not need when water is the ‘‘new gold’’.

Climate Change is already impacting us, and adding fuel to that fire is ridiculous.

NZs promised emission savings targets have been totally missed.

For a timely transfer from fossil fuels, we needed to have started 50 years ago when the problems were identified, but now is better than later.

Our tourism is growing, a signal that we need to re-invent the ‘‘clean, green’’ image, and the oil industry is the exact opposite.

We have no infrastructure that can deal with serious problems, if and when they occur.

Since 2000 in America alone, there have been more than 400 pipeline related ‘‘incidents’’ in an industry that says ‘‘trust us’’. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_pipeline_accidents_in_the_ United_States_in_the_21st_ century) Petroleum exploration is like passing a hand-grenade around with the pin out, just to see what happens. Time for a change of policy and government. David Russell Invercargill