Our View: Roading options must be explored

A New Zealand Transport Agency proposal to solve roading woes at Welcome Bay was always going to be controversial.
Traffic congestion in that area has been a source of trouble for many years and ideas to solve the issue have come thick and fast and usually been discarded quickly.
The latest plan would see the existing roundabout go and traffic heading west towards Pyes Pa on SH29 take a big bend around the garden centre, travel a short distance on Ohauiti Rd and then reconnect with the highway on a new road around Palmers.
Welcome Bay residents heading into town would no longer be able to go straight ahead at the roundabout but be forced into a dog leg down Ohauiti Rd, around Palmers and back up.
The agency's projects director Andrew Scott said the proposed new layout was one of the options being looked at for stage four of the project - the separation of across-town local traffic from highway traffic at Hairini.
In essence, a solution is being sought that would avoid the need for a costly underpass.
In the current economic climate, it is important that the NZTA explore all the possible options to solve this bottleneck.
What seems to be upsetting Welcome Bay and Ohauiti locals is that Prime Minister John Key made a pre-election promise in 2008 that a National Government would pump $100 million into a project to four-lane Tauranga's central corridor - now called the Hairini Link project.
That's what they want, not a $9 million band-aid.
Leading the fight is Ohauiti Rd resident Phillip Rumbal, who has so far gathered 140 signatures from other concerned residents.
Feedback from locals must be sought before any new roading plan is implemented. While this is their "neck of the woods", it must be remembered that they are not traffic experts and sometimes solutions that look clumsy, could actually prove effective.
Already, some good work has been done at the Maungatapu and Welcome Bay roundabouts with the new traffic lights system assisting peak-hour traffic flows.
On the other side of town, Otumoetai residents were skeptical about the plan to solve their bottleneck at the Brookfield shops.
Morning and afternoon peak hours at the series of intersections were a giant jam, causing frustration all round.
That is now all a thing of the past, with the implementation of what seemed like an odd system of lights that actually work incredibly well.
So let's keep an open mind about this Welcome Bay proposal and consider all the possibilities of the plan.