Call to improve standard of road near Curio Bay
A tourist operator says the road around Curio Bay has come an ’’absolute mess’’ and they should be maintained to a higher standard.
Invercargill Top 10 Holiday Park owner Philip Todd said the state of the road had become dangerous, especially with tourists swerving to miss potholes.
‘‘The road down there is just an absolute mess,’’ he said.
This month, Todd drove around the gravel road area and said he saw several near miss accidents because of the condition of the roads.
‘‘Drivers were going all over the road. It was really dangerous.’’
In one case he saw a van go over a blind hill on the wrong side of the road to avoid potholes.
The Southland District Council has a multi-million seal extension project under way.
A lack of cars on the road was the only thing that stopped a head on collision, Todd said.
It was atrocious to have a road in that condition when it was growing in popularity so quickly, he said.
The roads should be maintained to a certain standard but this was the worst he had seen it in ‘‘years and years’’, Todd said.
Southland District Council services and assets group manager Ian Marshall said because of tour- ist growth in the area the council implemented an $8.5 million seal extension project.
The project aimed to seal all of the unsealed roads in the area of the alternative coastal route which went through Curio Bay, he said.
The roads in that area had been ‘‘heavily maintained’’ for ‘‘well over two years’’, he said.
Weather played a part in the amount of potholes, especially on gravel roads.
‘‘Potholes develop all the time,’’ Marshall said.
But the weather had been ‘‘particularly good’’ so it had not been made aware to Marshall that there was a problem with the roads, he said.
Todd said the road two years ago was ‘‘nothing like it is now’’.
The amount of tourists meant that about 40 vans were sometimes parked at different freedom camping sites overnight, he said
The drive was often a place Todd would recommend to tourists but after seeing the state of the roads he would no longer suggest going to the area, he said.