New Zealand does a few things well. Scenery we are quite good at. We do striped marlin very well. We used to be good at rugby (hopefully this will get better again) and softball (vide supra) and yachting. A few people can run quickish on occasions, we have a girl with huge teeth who is good on a BMX bike. We make nice honey and our dead sheep pass muster with a few roast veggies. However of the many things we do badly building roads is one of our blind spots.
New Zealand roads are dreadful - especially if you own a 390 horsepower car and want, no require, yet more automotive grunt. I mean the first (or last) 30km of the so called State Highway One aren't even sealed. Most of aforementioned SH1 is only two lanes. There are many points along the way where the camber is just plain wrong. It has ersatz motorway bits which stop in the middle of nowhere as soon as you have settled into barrelling along with cruise control doing all the thinking. NZ roads also have a feature which I have not seen anywhere else in my reasonably extensive sampling of driving around the world. This is the three lane bit. Overtaking lanes I think they are called. You get warning about 2km out that a 100 metre overtaking lane is coming up where if you are driving a Veyron you might be able to get past a Massey Ferguson. The actual tarmac (we have no proper concrete roads, of course) gets a bit (not much) wider and the motoring security of a bit of paint means you can venture into a land where a mile back you would die. These overtaking lanes are the place where the Morrie Minor that has been sitting on 87kph for the past half hour suddenly and temporarily cruises along at 105kph. Still overtake able but at the risk of a few demerits and a few dollars.
Anyway as bad as these apologies for proper roads are I suppose they are better than nothing. We have a really quite expansive bit of three lane nonsense on my drive to and from the fields up both sides of Albany Hill. Well we did. On Sunday night a gang of Fulton Hogan's finest were out with enough traffic cones to circle the globe and a pot of white paint to obliterate about half of it. The steep bit where it is needed most. Why? I really don't know but strongly suspect that, perversely, safety is at the bottom of it. Building even the ersatz crap we fob off as roads ain't cheap; measured in millions per kilometre I'll be bound. Just getting rid of some of it with ten bucks worth of paint is insanity.
Watch this space. If I get to the bottom of this madness I'll report back.
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