Sick about Parua Bay Medical? Get over it

Subscribers from Generations X and Y may very well feel the need for sedative prescriptions upon reading of the “horrifying” situation created by the temporary closure of the Parua Bay Medical Centre (Advocate, February 13).

The community is scarcely sparsely populated and is certainly not remote. It is 10 minutes away from the sister-medical centre in Onerahi.

Many struggling families in rural Northland are well over an hour away from a GP.

May I suggest that the temporarily inconvenienced widen their horizons, get over themselves and get a taxi, which most of them can well afford to do.

Some of us babyboomers (the generation that never had it so good) now want too much of a good thing.

Their sense of entitlement threatens to stoke the fires of “ageism”, which is increasingly manifest in generations X and Y.

The best prescription for the body politic is to exercise a little patience until the backdoor facility is restored in two months’ time when doctors secured from overseas will be able to answer their SOS.

Tony Clemow Kamo One-way gridlock In response to Jude Greener’s plea (Advocate, February 10) for the Kerikeri District Council to “find a solution to our traffic problems and find it soon”, I can report that the council has had a solution on their books for many years.

As a Kerikeri resident at the time the one-way street system was introduced in 2006, and as a traffic engineer and traffic management consultant of 40 years, I was critical of design deficiencies in the initial plans and spoke on behalf of the Business Association at a public meeting.

The upshot was, I was asked to attend an after-hours “secret” meeting with Council’s traffic consultant plus councillors and senior staff, at which I was eventually handed a red pencil and invited to redraw those parts of the plans that caused me concern.

They reluctantly agreed, to most of the points I raised, but said others would be reviewed after the system was introduced. The remaining changes were soon made, after the system’s introduction, and Council chose to take credit for identifying them.

The reasons for Council wanting the one-way system were based on their expectation that the 7 per cent increase in annual traffic volumes would create gridlock in the CBD by 2016 if nothing was done.

It was only intended to be a temporary fix before the longplanned main-street bypass was “completed by 2014”. Its benefits would have seen a large amount of through traffic removed from Kerikeri Rd. However, I was aware that some vested interests fronting the bypass route were not happy with the proposed increase in traffic volumes and were lobbying to have the new route deferred.

So, what has the council been doing for the six years since the bypass was meant to have been completed? Much was made of the temporary life of the one-way system, both from the politicians and

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senior council staff. Where are they now? Maybe retired or no longer on Council with the bypass plan conveniently shelved and gathering dust.

Dave Murray

Kamo