Back on the long, winding road

June 19, 2010
For those convinced that Nelson is choking to death on its traffic, here's some news: things may not be as bad as you think. As the city embarks on another round of arguing over its roading needs, Geoff Collett looks at what the latest studies reveal about the health of its traffic arteries.
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Alisdair Daines has an anecdote he likes to share, about how Nelson's busiest road has become even busier in the 10 years he has been running his architectural business on the edge of one of its busiest stretches.
A decade ago, he says, he reckons that if he had tried to drive across Waimea Rd by sailing straight through the Hampden St intersection without stopping on his way to the office before 8am, there was a 90 per cent chance he could make it through unscathed. (He never actually tried, it should be added.) If he did it today, he guesses there is a 90 per cent chance he would hit or be hit by something on the way through.
"The amount of traffic over the 10 years we've been here, it's very, very noticeable, the increase over that time, " he says.
Mr Daines spends much of his working day in an office that looks down on the traffic light-controlled pedestrian crossing on Waimea Rd, used principally by the army of schoolchildren who flood the footpaths near Hampden St around 9am and 3pm each day.
If you believe the popular lore, you can imagine that he must have lip- read many a curse from agitated motorists stopped at the lights since they were installed in 2001, convinced that they are a principal impediment in the rush-hour crawl up and down Waimea Rd. After all, as Nelson Automobile Association chairman Gary Stocker says, the lights are one of the local road features most complained about by AA members.
But popular opinion might have it wrong.
As Nelson launches into the next round of its years-old argument about how to improve traffic flows between Annesbrook and the city, a stack of new number-crunching reveals trends and forecasts for both Waimea Rd and its sister route along the waterfront, Rocks Rd, which challenge some long-held assumptions about what's going on there.
Even Mr Daines' conviction that Waimea Rd has become steadily and significantly busier in the past decade may not be as clear-cut as it sounds.
As for the Hampden St pedestrian signals, Nelson City Council transport manager Andrew James can't help but allow himself a small smile when the subject comes up.
With the latest reports at his side analysing the points along the roading network where problems arise, "I'm able to talk a lot more confidently that the Hampden St pedestrian lights aren't the cause of congestion on Waimea Rd", he says. "I've always wanted to say that, I've always felt that, and now I actually can say that."
There's a point of professional pride here, after all. "Engineers need to make sure that when we are doing things, we're doing things right, " he says of the original justification for installing the signals.
But more than that, fully understanding what's going on with Nelson's main cross-city roads is critical to what could prove to be the single biggest, farthest-reaching roading project the city will see for a generation or more.
While the old familiar battle lines are being drawn as factions in the community prepare to go yet another round of debating the possibilities - a new road through Victory, widening Waimea Rd, widening Rocks Rd, creating clearways for temporary extra lanes during rush hours - it is already apparent that past predictions of steady, significant traffic growth overloading the existing roads have not exactly come to pass.
Traffic growth rates on both roads have been essentially zero over the past five years, Waimea Rd carrying about 26,000 vehicles per day, Rocks Rd about 20,000. People may complain of crawling traffic each morning and late afternoon, but the latest study suggests that their trips are taking only two to four minutes more than they would in clear traffic - and the delays have actually decreased in some cases over the past few years.
Past forecasts of high population growth generating large numbers of new commuters have been radically rethought. Now, the computer models used to predict the future suggest that traffic growth might actually be in the opposite direction: that with the opening up of new commercial estates south of Saxton Field and, longer- term, in lower Queen St (Richmond West, as it's known), more city residents people will be making a commute out of town in the morning.
Quite what that means for all the talk about exactly what the city needs for the future is one of the big questions the arterial traffic study will try to answer by the end of this year.
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The AA has been among the more vocal lobby groups arguing that Nelson needs a new road built down the Railway Reserve and through Victory to link Annesbrook to the city centre.
Mr Stocker is not backing away from that line, but he can accept that an outsider from a bigger city looking "objectively" at Nelson's traffic "would say we haven't got much to worry about".
Existing demands on both roads, he accepts, are "not intolerable, and it's not as if it's causing . . . major accident issues. It's probably more at the serious inconvenience level than anything".
"If, however, we looked at it subjectively as Nelsonians, [we would say] one of the things we don't expect to put up with and shouldn't have to put up with in our wonderful city of this size is any sort of traffic congestion at all."
Mr Stocker thinks the past five years' static traffic volumes on the roads may say more about the long-term ups and downs of Nelson's economy, he thinks, and he is certain that growth will return - and if nothing has been done about the roads when it does, the city could be in trouble.
The heat over Rocks Rd's long-term future in the city's roading network hit boiling point almost as soon as the latest proposals were made public.
The Waterfront Association - a community group set up to campaign to get heavy traffic off the road - has wasted no time in reviving its various arguments that the road is too precious as a seaside boulevard to sacrifice to endless streams of traffic, especially port-bound trucks.
For cyclists and pedestrians, it is a nightmare, says association vice- president Kevin Isherwood. Also, the association believes that the ground underneath part of the road is unstable, possibly prone to erosion from the sea, and unsuitable for growing numbers of big trucks.
The bald traffic counts disguise the "exponential" growth in truck numbers that residents and business owners have seen over the past few years, Mr Isherwood says. He claims to have spent 10 to 15 minutes waiting for a chance to cross safely.
Yet from the road management point of view, the New Zealand Transport Agency - which controls Rocks Rd and Wakefield Quay as part of State Highway 6 - maintains that despite its constraints, the road functions well as part of the highway.
Its SH6 designation means it is the route heavy trucks have to use, and NZTA Wellington region operations manager Mark Owen says that increasing heavy traffic "is something we will be looking at" as the agency carries out scheduled "heavy maintenance" over the next couple of years.
It has its constraints - notably the sea on one side, the cliffs on the other. The pavement is starting to fail in places (hence the need for that heavy maintenance); there are issues accommodating cyclists, and the roadside cliffs around Magazine Point, from which debris frequently tumble on to the highway, need on-going work to try to stabilise.
But Mr Owen says the congestion is nothing more than should be expected on a busy crosstown arterial road in a moderate-sized New Zealand city.
It has to be said that Nelson motorists don't always get the kindest rap - certainly not from other Nelson motorists - but Andrew James suggests that the evidence of how they cope during their daily trips up and down Waimea Rd is actually a credit to them.
He says a comfortable load for a two- lane road is 15,000 to 18,000 vehicles. At that volume, there's room for roadside parking, space for cyclists and pedestrians, and comfortable travel times.
The fact that Waimea Rd is about 50 per cent past that load and still coping "pretty well" is remarkable.
Perhaps part of the explanation lies with the long experience Nelson motorists have in dealing with roads functioning well beyond their capacity for far longer than anyone expected.
Back in the 1990s, before the Stoke bypass (now Whakatu Drive) was built, daily volumes along Main Rd Stoke hit 28,000 - a level then comparable to the notoriously snarled State Highway 1 at Plimmerton, north of Wellington. The long, slow trip into the city often turned into a stop-start crawl starting from around the Richmond deviation. When the bypass finally opened in early 2000 it had been something like 40 years since it was first talked of.
The real lesson, in other words - as any regular commuter using Waimea Rd will have long since realised - is that when it comes to traffic in this town, it pays to be patient.