Our new national symbol – the road cone
The news this week that Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency will be lowering speed limits along selected stretches of highways nationwide is the first step to getting our roads safe again.
A recent study of national transportation conducted by Auckland University revealed that some 70% of the population now feel that driving around is more unsafe than ever.
Our speed limit has been way too high, of course. I’ve just come back from Fiji, which by comparison has a limit of 80kmh, with speed bumps in every village. Far safer by comparison.
Lorna Langford from the old Bainham Store told me once that a trip to Ta¯kaka from Bainham used to be an all-day family event in her father’s Model T Ford. A bit over halfway, at the ford over the Tukurua Stream, her father would stop to check the radiator while the family had an early picnic lunch before carrying on to Ta¯kaka.
I try to imagine what that ford, just down from my house at Tukurua, once looked like – because the roading authorities went and built a culvert bridge over it in the early 1960s.
About 12 years ago, the then Transit NZ widened it so much that you couldn’t tell it was a culvert any more – the result being a straight Cannonball Run past our gate.
Once, my kids used to happily walk and bike up and down the main road, and ride their horses, too, but no way could any of the grandkids do that now – it’s just too dangerous.
The issue of ongoing maintenance programmes and road closures must also be to the fore for many motorists now, too, and I wasn’t surprised to hear that some motorists were abusive to road workers involved in resealing along the Coastal Highway.
I appreciate that it is the sealing season, but it was obvious to anyone trying to get places that the delays this year were unprecedented and excessively long in the hot conditions.
Even travelling along our section of State Highway 60 between Collingwood and Ta¯kaka has involved (these last few weeks) negotiating at least three separate stop/go lollipops and two long sections controlled by temporary traffic lights.
It also includes dodging the evergrowing, seemingly unstoppable ‘‘bump’’ at the beginning of Birds Hill – the still-expanding spectacle illustrating the immense power of groundwater and its ability to make an endless bevy of engineers scratch their heads for over 10 years now.
The mandatory need for a one-system-fits-all traffic safety management system for everything bigger than the most minor of potholes seems like such overkill.
Adverse weather events have sure taken their toll, and have upped maintenance programmes, too. But the mandatory need for a one-system-fits-all traffic safety management system for everything bigger than the most minor of potholes seems like such overkill.
We are now officially a country with more road cones than people. They are our new sheep, and we follow them without thinking.
Some situations, natural or otherwise, get better; others seem to go backwards.
One 30-year-old incident I wrote about in my book Swamp Fever was recently reprinted in Local Government magazine after the editor deemed it ‘‘topical’’.
It had all started when I spied a collapsing section of the culvert that drains my swamp under the highway. So I called the Tasman District Council in Richmond.
‘‘Sorry, we contract all that sort of thing out now – can you ring Sicon?’’ the receptionist kindly instructed me. But the man at Sicon said they were responsible to the council for bridges and reserves only. ‘‘Better ring Transit, they do all the highways,’’ he advised.
But the man at Transit told me that their highway inspection work was now being done by consulting civil engineers Montgomery, Watts and Hazard, based in Nelson. ‘‘Better ring them.’’
So I did, but they told me to ring Opus International Consultants, recently contracted to advise them on impending maintenance.
‘‘We’ll be out your way soon,’’ the Opus man said. At last, I thought, some luck.
Two months later, an engineer turned up with a small digital camera, but he didn’t seem interested in the culvert when I showed him.
‘‘What’s its number?’’ he kept asking.
‘‘What do you mean?’’ I replied. ‘It doesn’t have a number. I’ve lived here for nearly 30 years, and it’s never had a number.’’
‘‘Sorry, mate. It’s gotta have a number on a peg somewhere,’’ he said. ‘‘We can’t fix it if it doesn’t have a number. We’re only on contract you know, and we gotta go by the book these days.’’
I gave up at that point, deciding to fix it myself – which I did, digging out the offending section with a shovel and re-concreting it, before filling in the washed-out section with gravel I had carted in from Parapara estuary.
I was quite proud of the fix, even if I had no one to show it to.
Just 60 years ago, the 25km stretch from Ta¯kaka to Collingwood had seven roadmen permanently assigned to it, each assigned their own section of the gravel road.
Harry Wilson of Onekaka used to be one of them. He told me he knew every culvert along his stretch nearly as well as each of his kids.
Every day, he’d walk the full length of his section, carrying his shovel – first on one side, then back along the other, tidying up water tables and re-spreading gravel into potholes as he went.
Drivers in cars and horse-drawn traffic would keep him up with the local gossip and road conditions, right down to the state of all the big potholes around the district.
Harry told me that there was nothing he felt prouder of than his bit of road – and all the roadmen competed as to who could do the best job. It was a matter of great personal pride among them.
Whenever I now see those temporary traffic lights, and the endless signage and road cones stretching into eternity, I can’t help but think of Harry, and reflect how backwards we have gone.
It was the Romans who came up with the modern art of highway building, and many of their main arterials are still nearly as good as the day they were built.
In this country today, it’s two years if you’re lucky before resealing or at least major patching is required.
And putting a few million more road cones out there is not cutting the mustard when it comes to road safety.