A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
Opinion
Your correspondent Sonia Smith is quite right to question my promoting to Gisborne District Council a Tutira to Te Pohue road connection when the route isn’t even in our district — and congratulations to her group in obtaining a feasibility study on their alignment option adjacent to the railway to
Napier. But where is the result of that study? Has it been completed, and the findings made available to their group or the public?
My efforts in the 1990s on the Tutira to Te Pohue connection were on a different tack — a shortcut from northern Hawke’s Bay, Wairoa and Tairawhiti/Gisborne to Taupo and the central volcanic plateau — with the added advantage of a bypass route to Napier in the event of closure of the tortuous Lake Tutira and Devil’s Elbow section of SH2.
But when I submitted the proposal to Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, they simply did not want the responsibility of maintaining that extra few kilometres of road.
In reality, Hawke’s Bay people have little, if any, interest in SH2 north of the Esk Valley, except for a few who may like to holiday at Mahia or Waikaremoana. They have the very direct SH5 through to Taupo and further north and they spend large amounts on SH2 south of Napier constantly upgrading slower sections to near motorway standards.
The only way we — Wairoa, Gisborne and the East Coast — will get improvement to our road south is to work together and lobby Central Government.
My submission to GDC was the first step in trying to generate support and connection with Wairoa District Council to make that submission to Central Government. It is not only about resilience around the Devil’s Elbow, or a shortcut to Taupo, but a general upgrade of the substantially 1930s alignment south of Wairoa, developed when trucks had four wheels, and if they could make 55kmh that would have been a good day!
On a recent trip to Wellington I logged more than 70 bends 55kmh and slower (down to 35kmh) between Wairoa and Esk Valley. Is that good enough for 2023?
J. Wells
