A Tauranga roundabout that has put cars through the same family’s front fence four times is finally getting a set of changes, and the man who keeps paying for the repairs is not convinced they will work.
Tauranga City Council will make low-cost safety alterations to the roundabout where Waihi Road, Otūmoetai Road and Cambridge Road meet in the suburb of Judea, after an investigation found 32 reported crashes there since 2020. The work is expected to be finished next month, SunLive reported on Tuesday morning through Local Democracy Reporting.
The crash figures came from an Official Information Act request made by Local Democracy Reporting to NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi. Of the 32 crashes since 2020, two caused serious injuries and seven caused minor injuries. The agency listed 54 contributing factors across those crashes. Twenty-three were a driver failing to give way or stop, 17 were poor observation, and four were proven instances of alcohol involvement. Fourteen of the crashes happened around the Otūmoetai Road exit and 10 on the eastern Waihi Road exit.
What the council is actually doing is modest. It will put two lanes on the Waihi Road west approach, install limit lines at the Waihi Road pedestrian crossing, and refresh the road markings all the way through the roundabout. The limit lines will sit back from the crossing so that drivers stop far enough away to see people waiting, and so that people on foot can see traffic has stopped before they step out. The two-lane layout is intended to slow drivers down and move traffic through more smoothly.
Council transport strategy and assurance manager Karen Hay said the investigation found the roundabout’s signs and road markings met standards and clearly indicated give-way requirements. The crashes, she said, were mainly linked to “driver decision-making”.
That will be cold comfort to Chris Brazendale, who has lived on the corner of the roundabout for 16 years and has had motorists take out his fence in 2012, 2013, 2016 and again in late July this year. He told Local Democracy Reporting at the time of the most recent crash that hits at the roundabout were “a regular thing” and that “it’s kind of a worry”. His house sits about three metres from the fence.
“My wife and I were home, and we heard the initial bang and then the second one a split second later of the car hitting the fence,” he said in August. That crash involved two vehicles, one of which ended up on a transformer box and knocked out power to the area. Brazendale said insurance covered the repairs each time, but the crashes made him feel unsafe, and his wife Koralee had raised the idea of moving.
Told of the council’s plan, Brazendale said the numbers roughly matched what he had assumed, and that the council had been in touch about the changes. “It’s better than nothing, but I have to say, I am somewhat sceptical as to whether it will make much difference,” he told the Bay of Plenty Times. He had asked the council to make the intersection safer back in 2019, and said the layout was changed to a one-lane approach at the time without any noticeable improvement. His own preference is for speed bumps or traffic lights.
Neighbour Dan Allen-Gordon, who has lived near the roundabout for 25 years, said his wife’s car was written off about five years ago when another vehicle hit it roughly 50 metres from the intersection. “We were out of pocket around $6000 as we had to replace the car that was written off,” he said. “There have been many accidents at the roundabout, even after work was done to make it larger.” He said a steel light pole at the Otūmoetai Road entrance had been knocked down twice.
Western Bay of Plenty area road policing manager Senior Sergeant Wayne Hunter said police encouraged safe and alert driving at all times, recommending drivers avoid distractions, stay within the speed limit and never drive impaired. Alcohol and drugs were a factor in about a third of all crashes, he said. “If you’re under the influence, don’t drive at all.”
There is a gap worth noticing in the numbers. When the council first reviewed the intersection in August, Hay said there had been 54 crashes at the roundabout in the six years since improvements were made in 2019, including 13 that caused injuries. The NZTA figure obtained under the Official Information Act is 32 crashes since 2020, with nine injuries. The two counts cover slightly different periods, but the difference is also a reminder of what the national crash database actually holds. NZTA says its Crash Analysis System “records all traffic crashes as reported to the Transport Agency by the NZ Police”, and adds plainly that “not all crashes are reported to the NZ Police” and that “the level of reporting increases with the severity of the crash”. A fence flattened at two in the morning by a driver who leaves the scene may never enter the record at all.
That matters because road safety money follows the recorded numbers. Intersections that generate paperwork get investigated. Ones where the damage lands on private fences, letterboxes and power poles can look quieter on a map than they feel from the front window. You can see every crash NZTA has recorded near your own street, going back to 2000, in our interactive New Zealand crash map.
For now, Judea gets paint, a set of limit lines and an extra lane, and Brazendale gets to find out whether that is enough. His fence has stood up to four cars in 16 years. The council’s own investigation suggests the roundabout itself is built and signed correctly, which leaves the behaviour of drivers approaching it as the thing that has to change.
Do you live near an intersection where crashes are a regular event, and has anything ever been done about it? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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