\u201cThere must be something they can do. This is not normal. You can try to stay at home or go out early in the morning or late but it\u2019s just a bit frustrating.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Jono Brown first moved to Lake Hayes, he enjoyed a 15-minute commute to central Queenstown, but that quickly changed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe commute now can take anywhere from, on a good day, around 30 minutes, to on a bad day, around an hour,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we moved down here from Auckland 12 years ago, we didn\u2019t buy into Queenstown, with a 50,000-odd population, [being] stuck in traffic for 45 minutes to an hour. So yeah, it\u2019s frustrating.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tanya Stone, from Arthur\u2019s Point, said traffic congestion was affecting her role as a volunteer firefighter.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are a fair few of us on that side of town that have not been able to make the truck in time, making turnout times incredibly long and delaying an emergency response.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stone said she also worried about traffic delays working as the artist transfers co-ordinator for the Snow Machine festival.<\/p>\n
\u201cI briefed the whole entire driving team and I had to let everyone know, all the artists, that this is what we\u2019re experiencing in Queenstown at the moment, so be prepared for possible delays.\u201d<\/p>\n
Driving instructor Rachael Gerard said her business could not take on more clients, despite demand for afternoon lessons.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t take money off anybody to sit in a queue of traffic.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you\u2019re teaching somebody to drive, you have to be moving, you have to do manoeuvres. Now it\u2019s even becoming difficult even in between peak times like lunchtimes as well. You can often sit in a gridlock for 45 minutes to an hour-and-a-half trying to get somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n
Queenstown mayor John Glover said he decided to set up the traffic taskforce after hearing stories of three-hour school bus rides, people turning up late to school and missing appointments.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it\u2019s bad, it is really bad, and you don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to cause it. That\u2019s really challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n
Glover said the taskforce group of about 20 \u2013 comprising district and regional councillors, business leaders, transport representatives and mana whenua \u2013 had been working on practical traffic solutions.<\/p>\n
Early ideas on the table included passenger ferries and traffic forecasting.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we need to work out what is the most important thing to fund soon, and straight away? Where do we get that money from? If the normal sources just aren\u2019t going to work, we\u2019ve got to be quite creative. Who else can pay? How else can we fund some of these?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Brown said he wanted the brakes put on major housing projects, particularly fast-tracked developments.<\/p>\n
\u201cGet the infrastructure in place before we build more residential houses. We\u2019ve got 7000-odd residents in Lake Hayes Estate alone. The southern corridor\u2019s full.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe cart is so far ahead of the horse. It needs to slow down and we need to focus on the public transport solutions. There are some really good solutions out there, ie gondola.\u201d<\/p>\n
Glover said the mayoral taskforce was aware of concerns about infrastructure and many more houses planned for Queenstown.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re getting thousands and thousands of houses being built, potentially through the fast-track and we know the state highway is already full,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know NZTA\u2019s annual spend is going to decrease in real terms over the next three to five years. So everyone\u2019s looking around and saying, well, we\u2019re going to get busier and busier, the networks are already stretched at times and there\u2019s going to be no money coming in to address that, so that\u2019s a real concern.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stone said the situation should never have been allowed to get so bad.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the people that have been making these decisions about our roads \u2013 do they even drive our roads? Because if they did, surely they would understand the impact that they\u2019re having on thousands and thousands of residents and people that visit Queenstown.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThere must be something they can do. This is not normal. You can try to stay at home…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":601396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[97846,2829,53851,22504,10934,111,139,69,20930,213,22505,3946,810,102,4478],"class_list":["post-601395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-congestion","tag-fed","tag-firefighter","tag-katie","tag-mayor","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-queenstown","tag-sports","tag-todd","tag-traffic","tag-up","tag-with","tag-workers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}