The road to local election success

Ihave experience of potholes that goes beyond driving over them, feeling the bump, and swearing out loud about Waka Kotahi.

I know how to fix them. I attack the ones in our 42-year-old driveway with a vengeance, meaning I buy bags of prohibitively expensive bitumen from Bunnings and beat it into the holes with a rubber hammer.

It takes so much effort that my right bicep swells disproportionately to such an extent my former GP would remark on the fact he needed to change to a bigger cuff when he took my blood pressure. ‘‘Potholing again,’’ he’d remark. Public potholes are the topic of the day this winter, aren’t they.

The GP’s receptionist told me what a nightmare it had been driving up to Auckland and back the other weekend.

Last May, Lin and I headed up to get my gong and were surprised to see the state of the seal on the new bit of SH3 leading north from the Awakino Tunnel bridges. A shocking mess, needing speed limits. On brand-new road.

And there was that man who busted two wheel rims and tyres on his car recently, robbing him of nearly six grand for repairs.

Someone who seemed to know what he was talking about wrote a piece for the Taranaki Daily News explaining the complexities of road tar sealing and why what’s being done to Taranaki’s state highways is way off the mark.

The wet winter hasn’t helped. I gather you can’t get a good result when filling potholes if it’s raining all the time.

The pothole may rank as the single most politically charged phenomenon of our age, mainly because we’re one of the most motorised nations on earth, spend a fortune on our wheels, and get bloody annoyed when the governing bodies don’t do their bit and keep the roads up to scratch.

I recall an expensive exercise carried out by the Auckland Star back in the 1970s when it paid consultants to gather a bunch of us together to conjure up ways to stop the paper’s decline.

We chucked a lot of ideas around but only one of them was taken up.

We asked the Auckland public to alert us to potholes. And they did, in their hundreds.

It resulted in a daily feature – a photo and description of a pothole.

The local councils – of which there were more than a dozen in those days – scrambled to repair them.

It may even have boosted the paper’s sales … as temporarily as the repairs fixed the holes.

I’m going to recommend the idea to the editor. What a wonderful lead-up it would be to the impending local government elections, which otherwise look as mundane as ever.

I’m also going to highlight Murray Chong here.

I recall when he first stood for NPDC he based his campaign on finding and photographing the city’s potholes. It worked. He got in easily.

Where are you on potholes now, Murray?

Our streets are full of them still, and yet there you are going on about restoring the railways (in itself a good idea, mind). Not a word about the state of your council’s streets.

Are they bad? Sure are, partly because of the log trucks that pass through to the port.

I know every pothole and bump between Lower Vogeltown and the Westown Medical Centre because I’ve been driven over and around them for weeks to be treated by the wonderful physio who has fixed my sciatica.

For a while there I could barely stand the pain each time our light wee Suzuki Swift flounced its way along streets that have been patched and filled for decades, with every mid-carriageway hydrant sump compressed down into its own cavity by truck wheels.

What about it, Murray? If you want to be mayor, get out there with your iPhone camera and get clicking.

If you get the roads fixed I’ll vote for you.

On which topic, the sitting mayor is standing again partly on a platform of giving Waka Kotahi heaps over their lack of performance, and the fact they don’t spend on our roads the millions they collect from us in taxes.

I think this country made a massive mistake when it abandoned the railways.

I’m reminded of driving through Spain in 1972 and coming to Zaragoza. It took hours to pass through because of the biggest truck traffic jam I’d ever seen. In the middle of that I noticed a train go past. Its engine towed three empty carriages. Sound familiar?

I know every pothole and bump between Lower Vogeltown and the Westown Medical Centre . . .