KEY POINTS:
When travelling home at night I have noticed lit signs above the Southern Motorway warning that a certain offramp is closed or closing, and urging motorists to use "alternate offramps". This should surely read "alternative offramps". Is someone bad at spelling and/or grammar, or won't those extra
two letters fit on the signs? Stan Pinnegar, Glenfield.
It's the latter. A fixed variable message sign (VMS) can hold three lines of text, with 18 characters in each line including spaces. These signs, generally on motorways, would fit the word "alternative". However, mobile VMSs only have 10 or 11 characters per line, so in some cases "alternative" would not fit. Thus, in the interests of consistency, "alternate" is used. And Transit New Zealand's grammarians do (mostly) understand the difference in meaning.
I regularly travel from Wiri Station Rd east across Great South Rd onto Redoubt Rd to head south on the motorway. Wiri Station Rd has a speed limit of 70 kilometres an hour, and this continues across Great South. About 50m up Redoubt there is a 50km/h sign, but the next sign indicates an 80km/h limit, a few hundred metres south of the Redoubt Rd overbridge. Shouldn't there be a motorway speed sign somewhere on the onramp? And why do we have to drop to 50 km/h on Redoubt Rd, where there's mostly straight through traffic? Keith Glass, South Auckland.
Changes are a'coming, Keith, but not soon. Staff of the Manukau City Council are reviewing all the speed limits around the city centre, and they say that any alterations or modifications will be brought in when the State Highway 20 to State Highway 1 link is finished. That's probably two years away.
The job on the Northern Motorway from Northcote to Tristram is looking really good. When is it likely to be opened to help ease the bottleneck? Kit Robinson, North Shore.
It's all scheduled to be finished by the end of the year. Transit is building another northbound lane between Northcote and the Sunnynook underpass and the median is being used as a work area, to make room for the construction crew and a crane. The new lane will use part of the existing median, so new barriers will be installed. The Wairau Rd and Tristram Ave overpasses are also being widened as part of the project.
Q. What is the timetable for the onramp lights on the Northwestern Motorway, in particular at the Waterview/Pt Chev onramp? George Daniels, Blockhouse Bay.
A. Ramp-metering lights on all selected onramps on the Southern, Northern and Northwestern Motorways are scheduled to be operational by the middle of next year.
