School exit on agenda after bad accident

A dangerous intersection on SH1 has St Peter's School staff worried and the principal says it is the downside of being located on a busy state highway.

The intersection near the Cambridge school was back in the spotlight this week after a crash on Monday night injured seven people.

Waikato Hospital confirmed three women and a teenager from a Palmerston North family who were heading to Hamilton were hurt in a collision with a people-mover.

The four, aged 47, 21, 17 and 13, were last night stable in hospital.

The occupants of the people-mover, a Cambridge mother and her 1-year-old, have been discharged from hospital. The mother had four children in the vehicle and it is understood she had just collected children from a holiday programme at the school.

The crash was the second at the intersection in a week and the sixth since 2003. The New Zealand Transport Agency and police are meeting on Monday to discuss the crashes and how the intersection can be made safer.

Since 2003 there have been 22 crashes along SH1 between Hamilton and Cambridge but Transport Agency state highway manager Kaye Clark said accidents had dropped off significantly since work was carried out along the stretch of road in 2008.

St Peter's principal Steve Robb said the school's location on a main highway was a major concern and parents and senior students driving to the school were constantly reminded of the risks.

"So it's a matter of monitoring that and I think NZTA has done a good job of monitoring it. You can come up with all sorts of ideas, roundabouts and things like that, but they're not practical really."

Mr Robb said that in the past the biggest concern had been accidents at the school's busy times, but the latest incidents occurred when school holiday programmes were running.

Traffic in the area is expected to worsen when the Home of Cycling velodrome opens at St Peter's at the end of the year and work is already under way to identify how to integrate the new facility with the existing roading network. A condition of the velodrome's resource consent was that a traffic management plan be in place during events and that improvements be made to the existing access.

It is estimated the traffic load on that stretch of SH1 will lighten by more than half when the Cambridge section of the Waikato Expressway is finished in 2016.

Waikato road policing manager Inspector Leo Tooman said it was a heavy-volume road and he was keen to see what could be done to make the St Peter's School exit safer.