Crazy Intersections of our time: #31

This week – the stretch of Adelaide Road where it inter­sects with Brito­mart Street/Herald Street, and then, a little fur­ther up the road, with Lux­ford Street.

As you can see on our hast­ily assembled little map on the right there, North-flow­ing traffic splits into two lanes once it gets past the Britomart/Herald inter­sec­tion, so right-turn­ing traffic gets its own turn­ing lane into Lux­ford.

Now, this would work fine if there wer­en’t a couple of 5 minute park­ing spots (out­side a dairy) in the straight-ahead lane (photo 2). Cars parked in that 5 minute spot (indic­ated by blue in the graph­ic) act as a road­b­lock, so once the turn­ing lane hits a red light, traffic quickly backs up to the point where no-one can actu­ally get into the straight-ahead lane (photo 3).

And because the turn­ing lane only gets a short green once every cycle, the res­ult is grid­lock back down Adelaide Road, as all the traffic want­ing to go straight (into town) can­’t get into the required lane (pho­tos 1 and 4, the lat­ter look­ing South back towards the inter­sec­tion).

It’s even more frus­trat­ing dur­ing the morn­ing rush hour, as there’s vir­tu­ally no south­bound traffic any­way. All those cars sit­ting at the red turn­ing light are invari­ably stopped for no-one.

Mad­ness.

To make mat­ters worse, the turn­ing red light was the res­ult of anoth­er prob­lem that used to occur at this inter­sec­tion.

Back in the day, it was just a nor­mal old red/green light – you could take the turn if the way was clear. Prob­lem with that was that people headed south and turn­ing left into Lux­ford, would have to give way to traffic turn­ing across them from their right.Nat­ur­ally, south­bound straight-ahead drivers who could­n’t bear wait­ing behind a car giv­ing way would swerve out and around – the car turn­ing right into Lux­ford was now run­ning the risk of get­ting T‑boned by the impa­tient straight-ahead driver.

And hence the turn­ing light for turn­ing traffic com­ing from the South. But the thing is – drivers com­ing from the North who are turn­ing left have no way of know­ing they don’t have to give way!There’s no free turn sign or green light to guide them around the corner (photo 4), so cars still reg­u­larly give way to the long line of traffic oppos­ite them wait­ing to make their right hand turn, halt­ing all south­bound traffic (in exactly the way that used to hap­pen).

(Solu­tion: a big bloody round­about).