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Christchurch roads in need of funding boost CHRISTCHURCH is heading for peak-hour gridlock, with city drivers now facing a slower commute than Aucklanders.However, Christchurch Mayor Garry Moore says the South Island's biggest city is still missing out to its northern counterpart for its share of the hundreds of millions of dollars of road funding needed to fix the problem. However, Transit New Zealand, which compiled the travel-time indicator survey, said while congestion in Christchurch was worsening, the traffic speed figures were not comparable and belied the profound problems faced by Auckland. The figures released by Transit showed the average travel speed in Christchurch's morning traffic last month was 36kmh compared with Auckland's 39kmh. Transit said it knew the survey - about traffic congestion - was going to be difficult, but underestimated the problems it would cause and had abandoned plans to survey other congested routes at rush hour. Mr Moore said Transit's figures confirmed his view that Christchurch traffic was gradually slowing and was heading toward the serious problems faced by Auckland, Tauranga, and Wellington. "Christchurch is definitely slowing up. These things happen very gradually - Auckland traffic got slower and slower and slower until it stopped, and our incremental stopping is beginning," he said. "We're right down the bottom of the food chain for roading budgets and I think we've been disadvantaged. I've always said as mayor that it's important that Auckland gets its roads right but I think it's about time that central government realised that Christchurch and the South Island have roading issues that need to be looked at as well. "Central government has to put (in) $200 million to $300 million of extra funding. There has been a huge amount of money poured into Auckland, Bay of Plenty and Wellington and now it's our turn." Mr Moore said the problem would not be remedied by a simple solution, and required an interconnected approach outlined in the Urban Development Strategy, involving a major injection of funding, car pooling, more people living in the inner city, discouraging long commutes from lifestyle blocks, and limiting the size of shopping malls. However, Transit general manager operations Roly Frost said the two cities' average speeds were difficult to compare fairly. "The key point is that Christchurch's travel times contained a high proportion of urban roads with traffic signals and a lower proportion of rural routes and highway, so it has a greater proportion of congestion," he said. "There is, however, signs of increased congestion in Christchurch and that's one reason why we've decided to include it in the twice-yearly surveys." Mr Frost said many road improvements were scheduled for Christchurch over the next 10 years, designed to ease the increasingly congested roads. |
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