Hey, Christchurch City Council!

I have a rant.

I just spent over 35 minutes (for Aucklanders, that’s the equivalent to 2 hours) in a massive queue at the Colombo Street/Edgeware Road intersection - the traffic lights 🚦 there are completely and utterly ridiculous, unnecessary and cause major congestion.

Prior to the placement of traffic lights at that intersection traffic flowed fine - now you have traffic blocked up from both ends of Edgeware Road (East and West in the Edgeware village) and down Colombo Street heading North. I’ve seen a number of near misses due to vehicles trying to turn into Trafalgar Street coming from the East as the layout only allows about two turning vehicles to wait before turning into Trafalgar (with no turning bay). Turning vehicles coming from Sherborne Street and straight-through traffic from Edgeware Road on the East side of Sherborne Street are all affected by these stupidly placed traffic lights because they can’t access the West side of Edgeware Road due to congestion between the BP petrol station East and the Edge Cafe/Fresh Choice supermarket West - add to that vehicles trying to enter/exit into/from the BP petrol station, Bailies and the supermarket and you’ve just increased and compounded the congestion near that intersection again.

Now, I’m certainly no traffic engineer or city roads planner, but what I do know is that prior to those traffic lights being there there wasn’t any issue with traffic flow or congestion in that part of the city.

Admittedly congestion at this intersection is worse during peak time, as one would expect, but like I keep harping on about - prior to the traffic lights being placed there congestion was nowhere near as terrible as it is now.

Further, the cycle lane at the North end of Colombo Street is light controlled but despite that I’ve seen a number of cyclists proceed to try and cross the intersection on a red cyclist light and almost get wrecked by 2 tonnes of moving metal. Are cyclists even obliged to follow the cyclists red light rule the same way it applies to vehicles?

What has happened at this intersection is instead of increase safety or allow for better traffic flow, you’ve actually managed to do the complete opposite.

🤦🏻‍♂️