16 feb - yet another serious accident
22 feb - driver dies
Now I live on this road, and the corner in question is a few hundred metres away from my driveway.
for YEARS cars have been regularly coming off the roads in this area. some even crashing on the straight bits.
for YEARS the road has had a habit of having the edges slip away, or the road splitting open and water rising through the cracks
finally, early february, a crack opened on the inside of this corner, bringing with it water and silt. i blamed poor driving in wet weather, until i very nearly crashed my car myself in the DRY. there were weekly crashes where people hit the slippery stuff, spin, hit the inside of the corner and roll down the hill.
the council put up the 30kph temporary "slippery" signs - which do fuck all cause they leave them everywhere anyway.
after Ms Kirby (teacher from my old high school) crashed they put up a big flashing sign. this actually began to slow traffic.
now, to "fix" the road, these retards decided to address the tar bleed, not the fucking leak in the middle of the road. sure enough they rough up the surface, do a bad job of it too so now the corner is bumpy rather than flat, paint new lines and proclaim it to be fixed, leaving the slippery signs out to further desensitise the public.
meanwhile the crack continues to leak - albeit slowly, but it's still there.
Now, this is a corner that i can say with much experience can be managed at over 100kph in the dry, and 80kph in the wet, BEFORE they dealt with the tar bleed, BEFORE the crack opened up
I can also say, having spoken with most those who crash into my fence, all but ONE crash has been speed related, and that ONE crash he was doing in excess of 140kph and lost control on the straight bit. the rest are either driver inattention, driver incompentence, or poor surface combined with driver inattention and/or incompetence.
There will be other accidents cause by speeding, but those were speeding - not justification to lower the limit if people are crashing due to speed above the posted limit
But, yet again, SPEED is found to be the main contributing factor, and knocking 50kph is somehow going to solve this.
This just pisses me right off. the limit used to be open road, then they knocked it to 70. they NEVER had any sign telling people to do the corner at less than 100, despite the next one (a faster one at that) having a big yellow <<<45 on it
NOW all of a sudden it's speed that's a problem, not the fact that the road annually opens up and until now all they do is fill the crack with tar snakes. the fact that they just put more seal to fill in the sinking road.
The roads in this area are very busy, and in appalling conditon. they refuse to do anything to seriously combat traffic in the suburbs, infact the council has effectively made it worse, and they refuse to fix the detours people take to avoid the traffic until there is a death.
A few months ago i sent a complaint asking for road repairs, and a scathing remark on how deaths seem to be the only way to get things fixed, and asked who is responsible if another person dies on a road they've been warned about to fix. they said they have already spent their load on road repairs, and ignored the rest.
A classic example would be the couple that died a few year back hitting a power pole. they exit a corner to find the road dips away (big sinkhole that throws me from he seat of my bike), and promptly lost control, hitting a power pole. the sinkhole was immediately repaired. the sinkhole has returned, and was in my complaint. the sinkhole is still there, getting worse.
the only repairs in the area recently have been roughing up that one corner, patching only a select few of the sunken/slipping edges, and extensive planting of flowers on roundabouts
Frankly, I've had enough of this BS. Waitakere City Council, get your fucking ass into gear and address the problem - stop falsely blaming speed.
furthermore, there are no footpaths on Candia rd, and in spite of this people insist on jogging/cycling/horse riding along it, leaving horse shit behind for us bikers to avoid. frankly this is unacceptable. install footpaths or stop the pedestrians.
It is a 70Kph zone, a good way to bypass the conjested suburbs, and that it should stay.
Photos to come.
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Otherwise keep sending letters to anyone and every one you can think of until it gets fixed.
Originally Posted by rachprice
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