Following an incident where sunstrike caused an 85-year-old man to hit a wire median barrier on the Southern Motorway (State Highway 1) near Signal Hill on Tuesday, AA Otago District chairman Malcolm Budd told the Otago Daily Times it had been campaigning for sunstrike warning signs to be installed on the road for the past four years.
It had recently been told by NZTA the installation of such a sign was not a priority, Mr Budd said.
An NZTA spokeswoman said the agency had made the decision to not use sunstrike signs because the locations affected kept moving and the issue only presented itself for a short part of the year.
It was also difficult to find good places for such signs, particularly on multi-lane roads which already had a lot of things which drivers were watching out for.
National data from 2017 to 2021 showed the most sunstrike-related crashes happened between 8am and noon in June, followed by July then May.
In Otago there were 91 crashes which sunstrike had contributed to, which was less than 0.5% of the total number of crashes in the region.
Of those, 39 crashes caused injury, four of which were serious.
In Southland, 33 crashes recorded as having sunstrike as a contributing factor, which was about 0.8% of the total number of crashes.
Of those crashes, 12 resulted in injuries, four of which were serious.
It was important to drive to the conditions and adjust travel times around the key strike periods could make a lot of difference, the spokeswoman said.
"We encourage people to keep their windscreens as clean as possible inside and out, and be aware that sunrise and sunset are times when sunstrike can make it very hard to see the road ahead.
"If drivers in front of you slow on the crest of a hill or where a long ray of sunlight is coming through, you should slow down, adjust your windscreen visor and be ready to stop if necessary."
No injuries were reported in the Tuesday crash, and it was fortunate there had been a wire median barrier in place which prevented what could have been a fatal head-on collision, she said.
