NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi has recently called for submissions on its plan for improving safety at the troublesome Pine Hill Rd-Great King St intersection.
The intersection has a miserable, decades-old history of crashes ranging from minor fender benders to an horrific triple fatal in the early 1990s.
The agency’s preferred solution is to move the State Highway 1 northbound lane about 10m into a small area of the Town Belt to improve visibility and safety for drivers at the intersection.
While this will certainly improve visibility up Pine Hill Rd (to nearly 150m by my reckoning) I believe this solution will do nothing to solve the root cause of collisions at the intersection.
As drivers approach the stop sign on Great King St their visibility up Pine Hill Rd is limited by their vehicle’s passenger-side A pillar (the pillar supporting the roof at the corner of the windshield). That, combined with a malevolent curve in Pine Hill Rd, makes for a blind spot about 20m-30m from the intersection.
If drivers do not look fore and aft of the A pillar before proceeding, they are effectively entering the intersection blind.
So the real solution is to improve visibility in the 0m-40m range up Pine Hill Rd from the stop sign. Interestingly, one of the options NZTA rejected was moving the limit line at the stop sign.
The agency’s project page states: "One option explored was to move the limit line (where vehicles must stop at an intersection) on Great King St forward to improve driver visibility uphill. All other traffic movements at the intersection would stay the same. However, investigation showed that this change would not reduce the current safety risks at the intersection."
Leaving aside the erroneous assertion that vehicles must stop at the limit line (the rule is to stop where you can see vehicles coming from all directions. This could be behind, at, or in front of the yellow line), I believe that if the limit line was reoriented slightly to the west the blind spot would be eliminated.
I have experimented with this at the current layout by coming to a halt at a slight angle to the limit line.
The result is quite a revelation — a clear view up Pine Hill Rd that fully covers the 0m-40m danger zone.
NZTA is seeking feedback to its proposal at present; I would like to see it rethink its plan and see if a simple tweak is all that’s required to sort out this intersection.
• Gerard O’Brien is an Otago Daily Times photographer.
