Dunedin motorists wait more than an hour to travel less than 1km

Nicole Mathewson Reporter from Dunedin News

From reporter Hamish McNeilly:

When stop/go workers were replaced by traffic lights, time stood still.

Motorists travelling between Port Chalmers and Dunedin on State Highway 88 waited up to 90 minutes to clear one set of road works, near Forsyth Barr Stadium, on Tuesday.

One person missed a funeral while others missed appointments, leading to 12 complaints to Waka Kotahi.

Raewynne Pedofski said it took her just over an hour to travel less than 1km as she approached the stadium, which on Wednesday hosted thousands of fans for a Rod Stewart concert.

The delays were caused by stop/go workers being replaced with ‘‘automatic lights with a shorter time span’’, she said.

It led to significant traffic delays, and vehicles ‘‘clogging the intersections’’, she said.

Some motorists on the Port Chalmers Facebook page shared their feelings over the delays, including one who missed a funeral.

‘’Not acceptable,’’ she wrote.

‘’I turned around because I had a screaming baby, so frustrated there is no warning about this,’’ wrote another.

On Tuesday, the 9km stretch of SH88 had four listed road works on Waka Kotahi’s website.

While work on the $37m - $43 m shared pathway along SH88 had caused some delays since the project first started in 2020, the latest work near the Anzac Ave, Parry St roundabout, was unrelated.

Waka Kotahi senior network manager Chris Harris said road maintenance, not the shared path project, caused the congestion.

‘‘Waka Kotahi apologises to people held up (on Tuesday) and will aim to avoid long delays after Easter when this work resumes.’’

In recent weeks the site was effectively managed with manual stop/go traffic management, but on Tuesday morning the crew switched to traffic lights.

‘’These were not as responsive as we need them to be and this contributed to congestion and queueing in both directions.’’

A worksite between the roundabout and Ravensbourne was opened up to two lanes of traffic just after 1pm that day, which helped release the traffic build-up and ‘’resolved queueing fairly quickly once people could start moving through,’’ Harris said.

‘‘Most of the people we have spoken with have been understanding of the situation, and we appreciate the patience of everyone affected.’’

Harris said the agency responded quickly by reopening the road, but once work was under way, crews could not always pack up and get out of the way within minutes.

‘’We apologise for this impact upon road users. If we are expecting unavoidable delays, we normally aim to communicate these in advance so that people can plan ahead. In this case, we underestimated the effects of the change in the traffic management.’’

Jarrod Hodson of the West Harbour Community Board, said the ongoing roadworks spread over multiple sites were ‘‘unfortunately just something we have to deal with’’.

He hoped that steps ‘’would be taken to help prevent the same situation that become a major issue from happening again’’.

Meanwhile, the shared pathway was due to fully open in the middle of the year, and one person who regularly cycles the route is Cr Steve Walker.

He told Stuff he could leave his house in Port Chalmers and be at his desk at council, in central Dunedin, in under 30 minutes.

He was confident that when the cycleway opened that time would be reduced to under 25 minutes.

Walker said it wasn’t uncommon for him to see friends stuck in traffic, who would later message him with the word ‘‘bastard’’.