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RNZ News
6 days ago
- General
- RNZ News
Waikato Council installed 'stupid' road layout on back of six complaints
The chicanes being used for the new road layour. Photo: RNZ / Natalie Akoorie A council that installed chicanes on a once quiet country lane-turned-rat-run to force drivers to reduce speed, did so after only six formal complaints and without consulting the community. The move infuriated Tamahere residents near Hamilton , who say the reflector hipsticks and one-lane chicanes are a major crash hazard during fog and at certain times of the day with sun strike. At an explosive public meeting in the sought-after Waikato country suburb on Tuesday night, the majority of about 70 residents who attended, demanded Waikato District Council end the trial now. "My suggestion is the trial is over," one man said to a round of applause. "I think the quicker they're removed the better and I think we're now sitting in a stupid, dangerous situation there." The four-month trial of four chicanes on a stretch of Birchwood Lane was introduced without notice in mid-May and was due to run until September after the council received six formal complaints and other emails about excessive speed on the road. The backlash was immediate, with residents bemoaning the new road layout on social media and rejoicing when vandals removed two of the chicanes just four days later. The new layout. Photo: RNZ / Natalie Akoorie Council general manager of service delivery Megan May apologised at the meeting for the lack of consultation and pointed to data taken from a week in 2022 which showed the average speed of drivers on the 50 kilometres an hour road was 61kmh. A small number were travelling faster than 70kmh. She said the speeding appeared to be from motorists passing through the area who were trying to avoid congestion at the Airport Rd roundabout and Tamahere on-ramp to the Waikato Expressway. "Rat-runners" were instead detouring through Tamahere back roads including Birchwood Lane, she said. The lane became a feeder route to the city and other parts of Tamahere that had their access to Hamilton closed with the opening of Alfred Main Drive, which only provides access to nearby Hamilton suburb Hillcrest. An aerial view of Birchwood Lane in Tamahere shows the road is a feeder for Newell Rd and also traffic from Airport Rd into the Hamilton suburb of Hillcrest via Alfred Main Dr. Traffic using Alfred Main Dr cannot access the Waikato Expressway. Photo: RNZ/Googlemaps But Birchwood Lane resident Andrew Mowbray pointed out the data showed the speeding was largely confined to between 8am to 9am and 2pm to 3pm, when the nearby Tamahere Model Country School started and ended each day, pointing to residents as the speedsters. Mowbray argued the road had the wrong speed limit and could cope with 60kmh which was why the average speed was 10kmh above the speed limit and pointed to surrounding roads which were 60kmh. Another resident queried how many crashes had occurred on the road during the three years since the data was collected; the answer was two. One of those was a drunk driver who was charged by police. A Waikato Hospital emergency department doctor and Tamahere resident queried how the chicanes protected children and pedestrians using the Birchwood Lane cycleway to get to and from school, the shops and the park, when none offered a way for pedestrians to cross the road. She asked why a speed camera and pedestrian crossings including on nearby Wiremu Tamihana Dr weren't considered instead. Waikato District road policing manager inspector Jeff Penno said to be eligible for a speed camera the road must have a documented crash risk. Birchwood Lane didn't. Penno told the meeting he was surprised at the new road layout because of the potential for head-on crashes. "The police have concerns about the conflict of vehicles. We've been there the last two weeks - we are seeing vehicles speed up to get through." Residents pointed out there was no indication of who was supposed to give way. Penno said police recently issued 129 speeding tickets. Residents felt the chicanes were pointless because they didn't effectively address the speeding concerns or make the road safer for pedestrians. Other traffic calming measures including a painted median-barrier strip pushed cars into potholes and loose gravel, which one man said was extremely dangerous. "S*** I hope the council's preparing themselves for a head-on accident. You guys are gonna be liable. You really will because you've had the feedback, you know it's dangerous and your proposal is you would like to carry on with the trial." When May asked if the council should wait until there was a death or a child hit on the road before the council did something a woman replied pointing out a lot of people believed the road was more dangerous now. "How would you feel if someone was killed because of what you've put in? That's what we're hearing tonight." Resident Lauren McLean said she supported the trial and asked what the community gained if the speed increased to 60khm. "Tell me what we lose. If we have trucks going down there at 60 or 70, we start degrading the road and trust me I live on Birchwood Lane, I see the trucks go past every day. "We make it less safe for our children to cross. We make it less safe for people using the cycle path. We make it less safe for horses. We make it noisy for residents." Tamahere Community Committee chairperson Charles Fletcher said Birchwood Lane, once a private right-of-way that was extended to become a through-road in 2018, was never designed to be the feeder road it was being used as. "We made submissions on that road when the council decided to open it up and turn it into a feeder road; we said that it had to be upgraded to the same standards as Newell Rd. "The council over-ruled us and said 'No it doesn't have to because it's not going to get that much traffic on it'." He said the trial should be aborted. "This trial's probably over and I think the council should take all that crap down and start again." Residents asked the council to remove the chicanes, consider the concerns about the danger and the typography of the road after one of the chicanes was installed at the top of a dip causing a number of near-misses, and come up with a better solution.
RNZ News
20-05-2025
- RNZ News
Residents irate over council's abrupt installation of traffic-calming measures
Two cars meet at the one-lane traffic calming measures on Birchwood Lane. Photo: RNZ / Natalie Akoorie On the outskirts of Hamilton in the sought-after suburb of Tamahere, the residents of Birchwood Lane are at odds over the road's speed limit, and the traffic calming measures the council has introduced. Last Tuesday the residents of Birchwood Lane in Tamahere came home from school and work to find a "new road layout" that was announced by a Waikato District councillor on Facebook earlier that day. "Following evidence of continual speeding down this road - and many complaints from local residents and discussion at Tamahere Community Committee level, including hosting a Waikato Police presentation - the council is introducing traffic calming measures as a trial," councillor Crystal Beavis wrote. 'Traffic calming' is a term that refers to design changes that slow traffic to make roads safer. On a short stretch of the mostly straight 50km/h road, four chicanes had been erected making the road one lane at each point. The uproar was almost immediate and a war of words between neighbours exploded onto a residents' Facebook page. "Very unpleasant drive to the school and back. So many cars waiting, wondering who should give way. Good traffic flow totally broken," one annoyed mum wrote. By Saturday, one of the structures had been anonymously removed and left on the side of the road. The removed chicanes on Birchwood Lane in Tamahere. Photo: RNZ / Natalie Akoorie The day before Tamahere resident Peter Mayall emailed the council, copying in dozens of residents, saying the chicanes had made the road dangerous. "They were put in without obviously consulting the community to address a problem which probably in my mind doesn't exist but the council has obviously had a few complaints about speed and I'd say probably about boy racers which they want to address," he told RNZ. Mayall said a once dual-carriage road, home to lifestyle blocks, open fields and a cycle path, had been turned into a confusing bottleneck and he asked the council to remove the chicanes. "There's also obviously sun strike down that road and there's a dip and so it makes it really dangerous [for] people deciding who gives way, and on that small stretch of road there's four of them." Mayall, who has lived in Tamahere for 15 years, argued the speed limit was too low on a road that was once an 80km/h cul-de-sac and he suggested lifting it to 60km/h. Birchwood Lane resident Andrew Mowbray said he was surprised when the chicanes went in and checked with neighbours who also knew nothing about them. "Birchwood Lane's a wide open road. It's got a footpath removed. Realistically it should have a speed limit somewhere between 60km/h and 70km/h just because of the type of road it is." He said the council should have consulted the whole community because he believed there were other areas of the road where risks to pedestrians were higher, including by the roundabout opposite the shops. "The chicanes... actually don't achieve anything at all in terms of reducing the speed where you've got kids crossing or where there might be an interaction between vehicles and pedestrians." But another Birchwood Lane resident said she was disappointed one of the chicanes had been pulled out. Lauren McLean said the vandalism amounted to bullying. "It lasted three days despite the fact that it was really clear that this was a trial and the fact that people threw a tantrum after three days - and I do think it's a tantrum because people could have just lived with it. "And it's robbed us of the opportunity to figure out whether this was actually the right thing or not because it's now been stripped out and it's not even as it was." She said parents had raised the problem of speeding on the road which was a main feeder to the school and park in the area. McLean said she and her husband couldn't let their children aged seven and five bike to school because they have to cross Birchwood Lane to access the cycle path. "We live between two bends which makes it especially awkward because we're on the opposite side of the road to the pathway that leads to the school... and so many times we'll be about to cross the road with the kids and someone will come screaming around the bend." She "absolutely" supported traffic calming measures but didn't think the council had given residents enough warning. The council said Birchwood Lane was a "rat-run" for commuters between Hamilton and State Highway 3 via Airport Rd because that route avoided congestion at the Tamahere on and off-ramps to the Waikato Expressway. Waikato District Council general manager of service delivery Megan May said traffic in the area had grown with the development of Tamahere, which now has an estimated population of 7000, and because of the adjacent expressway. She said monitoring since 2022 showed 80 percent of drivers on Birchwood Lane sped by 20km/h over the limit and some cars were going faster than 100km/h. "The intent is to do a trial," May said. The budget for the trial is $50,000. "We're trying to find a cost-effective solution that will slow the traffic down in that area. The plan is to see how it goes, seek feedback on the community and make a decision on a final solution once we get that feedback." May said speeding had been a problem since the road opened in 2018 and the council had received a steady stream of complaints from residents, ward councillors and the Tamahere Community Committee. "I guess from a staff perspective we made an assumption that there was enough community knowledge about the topic and the intent to do a trial on some traffic calming. "In hindsight, obviously given the feedback from the community through the Facebook page, we didn't communicate this well enough and in hindsight we should have done more to make sure the community was aware of what was happening and what our intent was." May said the chicane that was removed would not be reinstated. She said there would now be a "drop-in" session for members of the public in Tamahere on 3 June.
