We just want to stay safe
KATHRYN WRIGHT feels she is on the front lines in the tourist driver debate.
One of the most notorious roads in the debate over tourist drivers is where I call home. From Queenstown, the road snakes around Lake Wakatipu, around narrow hairpin stretches and terrifying cliff drops.
This stretch of road is known as the Devil’s Staircase. It is jaw-droppingly beautiful and very distracting.
After the Devil’s Staircase, the road widens and straight stretches become more apparent. The road continues much like this to Te Anau, my home, and then the juggernaut which is the Milford Road alpine pass begins.
Te Anau is home to around 2000 permanent residents. Annual visitor numbers to Milford Sound are around half a million per year. If going to Milford by road, as most do, you must pass through the township of Te Anau.
Minus the visitors that travel by bus, that’s still a sizeable number of visitors who self-drive.
We survive mostly on tourism. Our shops and restaurants are teeming with tourists. Tourism and hospitality rely on visitors. Our roads and streets are filled with rental cars, camper vans, tour buses and ‘‘back packer’’ style vehicles. Once and again, we pass another local, and wave.
We sometimes see more instances of dangerous and questionable driving in one afternoon than most people in any given city will see in a week. Yes, there are statistics that point to the ratio of overseas visitor versus New Zealand nationals involved in accidents being very low, but this is a national average. It becomes much more concentrated the more you venture into high tourism areas.
Twenty years ago, most tourists who visited Te Anau would have arrived by tour bus. Today, there are more and more tourist self-driving – mainly, it seems, Chinese families. The rise and rise of the people mover, packed with Chinese nationals, luggage piled into every spare inch in the back leaving no visibility, and often travelling in convoy, has been quite amazing to watch.
Tourists arrive into our country and are able to get straight off the plane and into a rental car. Some of them have come from areas where the speed limit is 40kmh. They have never driven any faster. Some drivers have no more than 30 minutes driving experience. It is concerning they are free to drive at 100kmh on our alpine pass roads, immediately. Many times they grossly underestimate the time it will take to reach their destination when only the number of kilometres is taken into account, and make poor decisions to reach their destination quickly.
In this country, teenagers are able to sit their driver’s license at 16 years of age. They must pass stringent tests and checks before they are deemed skilled enough to earn their full licence. It is common to fail on the first or second attempt. They must keep studying, practising and re-sitting, until the licenser is confident that they are not a danger to themselves or others on our roads, and know our road rules inside and out.
When tourists enter our country, as long as they have either an international driver’s permit or a current driver’s licence from their own country – translated to English where applicable – they are free to drive legally here from the day their holiday begins. Some countries have less than scrupulous methods of obtaining a drivers licence in the first place.
On any given day, the following incidents can regularly be seen, and I have not made any of this up, I have seen these things with my own eyes, sometimes all in one trip to town:
Convoys of people movers travelling at 70km in a 100km area, not allowing any traffic to pass.
Campervans weaving all over the road.
Drivers shifting from very slow to very fast driving and back again, regularly. Very difficult to predict what these drivers will do next, probably one of the actions below.
A campervan coming at me and my family on the wrong side of the road. The driver realises just in time and pulls onto his side. Gives me a friendly wave.
Rentals/people movers/campervans parked at side of a narrow open road, but still half on the road, taking photos of deer/sheep/alpacas in the paddock. Coaches and other vehicles braking suddenly to avoid collision.
❯❯ Rentals driving wrong way up one way street. Give friendly waves to anyone fleeing their path.
❯❯ Rentals and campervans speeding past our small local school at 80kmh in a 50kmh zone.
❯❯ Rentals cutting corners on the Milford Road, to make the road ‘‘less windy’’.
❯❯ Rentals passing cars on Milford Road on yellow lines and blind corners.
❯❯ Rentals driving at excessive speeds (over 120kmh) on very dangerous sections of Milford Road during severe frost and snow conditions.
❯❯ Rentals and campervans reversing into and scraping other vehicles in carparks, regularly.
❯❯ Drivers stopping in the middle of the road suddenly while looking for their accommodation. Everyone else braking suddenly.
❯❯ Drivers not seeing or maybe not understanding what an intersection is, and just carrying on through the give way sign. Friendly wave.
As a local, I wonder what I will face every time I get into my vehicle. With the busy tourist season approaching, how do I protect myself and my family? How should my friends and neighbours protect themselves? What about our children on their way to school?
At the very least, I’d like to see a system implemented where overseas visitors must pay any fines in full before departing our country, and a situation where they must claim on their travel insurance to pay for the millions of dollars in rescue helicopters and hospital care they receive if they’re involved in an accident – just like we have to when we visit their countries.
We don’t want the tourists to stop coming here but we want to stay safe. We want them to be safe and to be able to return home to loved ones, with photos and great memories instead of fines and disqualifications, or at worst, in a body bag.