Near miss at notorious tourist turn-off
Matamata’s infamous intersection connecting unfamiliar tourists to Hobbiton has struck again – and this time, the near-miss between two vehicles was caught on camera.
Matamata man Steve May was travelling along Hopkins Rd on Thursday when a Mazda station wagon turned off State Highway 29 directly into his path.
The car, which May has had confirmed belongs to Avis Rentals in Auckland, was completely on the wrong side of the road.
In dashcam footage captured by May, the driver of the Mazda then proceeds to make a hand gesture, signalling that May was the one in the wrong.
‘‘I couldn’t believe it. I came to a standstill and he was pointing that I was on the wrong side of the road,’’ he said. ‘‘And he didn’t stop. They turned left and went to Hobbiton, I imagine.’’
The near-miss follows an incident at the intersection on December 10, in which seven people were injured in a three car collision. And, in 2016, an American tourist died after the vehicle she was travelling in collided with a logging truck.
Fed-up residents called on the Matamata-Piako District Council and the New Zealand Transport Authority to fix the deadly intersection. May is also unimpressed with the lack of action.
‘‘The locals are not surprised,’’ he said. ‘‘We are a tourist town, so we’re used to driving with an extra nature, and the amount of times I’ve found tourists reversing out the wrong way on a road, or they are looking right instead of left . . . unfortunately, we may have grown used to it.’’May said he always approached that particular intersection with caution.
‘‘We’ve had a lot of boom with Hobbiton and I think it’s a classic example of where Matamata has grown substantially because of it.
‘‘I hear in the grapevine that it’s a $50m business but they haven’t updated the infrastructure.
‘‘Eventually someone is going to die and if that was a huge roundabout, that wouldn’t have happened,’’ May said.
Matamata-Piako Mayor Jan Barnes said the intersection falls under the jurisdiction of the New Zealand Transport Agency, but doubted a roundabout could be implemented on such a straight piece of highway.
But Waitomo Mayor Brian Hanna ‘‘hounded’’ the agency to do something about his own town’s deadly intersection of State Highways 3 and 37.
Two tourists died in two separate accidents at the site in 2012, and Hanna said residents were desperate for change.
‘‘We’re all quite good, polite peaceful people but we don’t want anybody dying on our roads, let alone Kiwis,’’ May said. ‘‘I certainly wouldn’t want my children to die due to somebody driving on the wrong side of the road.’’
Hobbiton Movie Set, located on Buckland Rd, has experienced substantial growth in visitor numbers, from 33,000 in 2010/2011 to 552,000 in 2016/2017. The practical maximum capacity of the site for Movie Set tours is 3500 visitors per day,
Steve May
which equates to a peak traffic generation of approximately 2084 trips per day, according to a document provided to Matamata-Piako District Council.