KEY POINTS:
When a busy traffic roundabout is reduced from three lanes to two, logic suggests the constraint will prompt lengthy backlogs of vehicles. That has been the result of just such an exercise at Panmure.
Given the resulting rush-hour mayhem, it would also be reasonable to expect that the original roundabout configuration would be restored immediately. Unfortunately, logic has not been the Auckland City Council's strong suit in both the creation of the Panmure circus and its response.
Complaints from motorists enduring much longer trips to work have yielded only an appeal for patience from the council's road safety division. The roundabout, it says, is being monitored, but no adjustments will be made until next month when the traffic peaks with the resumption of tertiary education for the year.
In other words, the situation will get worse before anything is done. That is unsatisfactory, no matter how much the council needs to improve safety at the intersection. It is also unfair of the council to try to blame new Land Transport New Zealand regulations for the fiasco.
The regulations can hardly have been drafted with this application and outcome in mind. Indeed, the lanes reduction is as likely to encourage dangerous driving as to reduce the number of accidents, the vast majority of them minor, at Panmure.
Roundabouts are the preferred method of regulating traffic in countries such as Britain. They work effectively, albeit sometimes as a seemingly organised disorder.
The greater hazard associated with them in this country probably says something about driver education and the desultory punishment of dangerous lane-changing and such like.
Tackling both of these shortcomings would represent a more cogent response than the orchestration of two-kilometre bank-ups of irate motorists. This mistake should be fixed at once.
