Rudman's city: Vampire council craves blood to lubricate slow bureaucracy

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Mayor John Banks has this vision that he can wave a wand and suddenly roads and tunnels will blossom throughout his city over the next three years.

I hate to be the one to break it to him, but, truth is, the council's road-builders work to a rather more sedate timetable.

If he doesn't believe me, could I refer him to the council files on a rather perilous stretch of inner-city Jervois Rd, in Herne Bay, which he used to know rather well. It's right outside his old King Edward VII Restaurant - now Erawan Thai Restaurant - on the corner of Lawrence St.

It's a curved stretch of road that turns to glass in the wet and delights in spinning cars with gay abandon into bus stops, fences and other cars, parked and passing.

For more than a year, shopkeepers and residents have been trying to cajole council officials into action. Finally, a month ago, traffic safety engineer Mohammed Hasan promised that skid-resistant paving would be applied "around March 5, 2002".

They are still waiting. Hasan told me yesterday that it would be done by the end of this month.

It is all a matter of priorities. To be declared a black spot worthy of rapid consideration, the council's safety works bible ordains that there have to be three injury accidents.

The fact that four bus shelters were demolished there between February 8 and December 7 last year, and miraculously neither drivers nor waiting passengers were injured, doesn't rate.

The need for blood to trigger action is the same twisted logic Transit New Zealand employs in setting its road-building priorities. It has a benefit-cost ratio formula which is heavily biased towards road deaths and therefore tends to favour winding but underused rural roads.

As one disgruntled Auckland road planner told me, it's hard to kill yourself in an Auckland traffic jam. But I digress.

The only action council officials took as a result of the December 7 bus stop demolition was to protect council property.

Obviously conceding the residents' case that this was a perilous spot, the officials decided not to rebuild the shelter in the firing line, as they did after the three earlier accidents. Instead, they said they would look for a new site. In the meantime, bus passengers were left to stand in a row in the rain like skittles. And the cars continued to skid out of control.

The latest round of dodgems was last Thursday, when rain descended after a long stretch of fine weather. The first incident was a woman heading into town from the west spinning out of control into oncoming traffic. Two cars were totalled.

Sitting in her window-seat grandstand, Dominion Books proprietor Heather Northey saw it all and says that accident was quickly followed by two more skids. In both, no harm was done. "You see them coming to a halt facing the wrong way, counting to 10, then much more slowly driving away."

Last year she saw a bunch of school children demolish the bus stop. "None of them was hurt. They just got a hell of a fright and the bus stop was wrecked."

Resident Brenda Harris has been spearheading the campaign for improvements. Her children use the bus stop and one of their mates was waiting there when it was totalled a year ago. He wasn't injured, which was lucky for him, but not for the campaign for a safer road.

Harris soon discovered that without blood spilled, the council was not really interested. She soldiered on, keeping a detailed record of the shelter demolitions last year - February 8, March 28, October 21, December 7 - plus a record of her letters and phone calls to the council on the issue.

Most aggrieved has been Erawan Thai Restaurant owner Pat Hickey, who has lost parts of his white picket fence seven times since he opened in November 2000. Last Thursday his electrician was restoring power to his outside menu board after an earlier crash when he witnessed the latest mayhem.

Hickey has just strengthened his fence and installed heavy boulders behind to create a defensive redoubt. He wants to stop cars hitting his gas main and incinerating not just his business but the students living in bedsits below.

Local pressure has finally paid off. The site still doesn't rank high enough on the priority list for action, but because of the clamour, alternative cash has been found from the maintenance budget.

As for a new bus stop, that's still a bit of a problem. The original proposal to move it up the street has been blocked by the city heritage department. They don't want it outside a nice old villa - even though its existing site is in front of a very nice old villa.

And so it goes on.