A few years back, I wrote a piece where I lamented the fact that rather than adopting the Haast’s eagle as our national symbol, instead, we settled on a small, flightless, blind, nocturnal, territorial bird with a questionable disposition (according to more than one person in the know I’ve discussed it with). But I’ve had an epiphany on that one over the Christmas and New Year holiday period. Maybe, it is on the nail.

This catharsis of sorts washed over me while I looked over SH60, the Takaka Hill road. The lower southern section of the road took a spanking from Cyclone Gita in early 2018. It was reopened to dual carriageway traffic after remedial work at a break-neck pace just before the 2021 Christmas throng arrived. Before Gita, the section of the road was a narrow, winding, steep old trot with some real doozy corners. What we have for 1320-odd days of reconstruction is a narrow, winding, steep old trot with some real doozy corners. (No, that’s not a typo.) According to regular traversers driving bigger gear, two 23m B-Trains still can’t pass at some points, and it’s steeper in places. Yay us!

Moving on. After all these years, something I never honestly thought I’d see in my lifetime has, in fact, come to pass. A vitally important infrastructural roading project in an area with almost no resilience, Transmission Gully, now sits finished. It’s been an incredibly successful start-to-finish Goliath, highlighted with fabulous communication, accounting, and finger-pointing. They’ll write books on it, I’m sure – maybe not the ones you’d hope for. But at least it’s finished… sitting there… just, sitting there… sitting. As the adage goes, the job’s not completed until the paperwork is done. And so, it sits, and sits, and sits. At least when you’re in the queues at either end, it looks impressive.

In terms of roading highlights, how could I miss the interminable ‘safety upgrade’ of dear old SH2 between Waihi and Omokoroa? This must surely be the embarrassment of the century, in time and approach, not to mention the appalling end product? If there were ever a justification for some rule about the number of road works you can impose on a national state highway per 100km, this project is it. If there were ever an example of how little politicians know about how our economy is moved, this project is it. Locals and regular users are now ‘punch-drunk’, I guess you’d say, or desensitised to the point where they don’t even see the colour orange anymore. Vast tracts of 50kph with nothing happening, and often speed restrictions with no end sign. Eventually, everyone just slowly moves on until the next ‘Road Works Ahead’ warning 5km up the road. In terms of safety, the construction crews are being done a monumental disservice by those who purport to protect them.

But enough of roads. To see the Takaka Hill firsthand and experience the Picton-to-Christchurch alternative roading mess that is the SH1, SH6, SH63, SH65, and SH7 Murchison/Lewis Pass route, I needed to cross the Cook Strait on our compromised Interislander ferry service, with one boat not there and one of the others a bit on the fritz. At least we’re consistent! You can’t have one bit of infrastructure working like a trooper.

To finish, let’s stick with consistency as a theme. Cell-phone coverage consistency, to be precise. Yes, I know we’re creeping into areas outside the government’s control, but in terms of the 21^st century, there should be a requirement for all national state highways to have 100% coverage. It’s no use being ridiculous and saying ‘everywhere’ because that’s never going to happen, but the country’s main arterials? Highways of economic and strategic importance? Most definitely. Having an hour’s worth of blackspot on a carriageway as important as SH7 is reprehensible.

Yes, so that was it. A moment of clarity and peace washed over me there on the Takaka Hill at Christmas. Maybe, just maybe, we did choose the right bird? Who wants to soar with the eagles anyway when you can grub around in the undergrowth in the dark?

All the best

Dave McCoid,
Editorial Director