No 'cast-iron' promise on SH2 work

Improvements to the stretch of State Highway 2 which has claimed 40 lives in the past five years may not go ahead this year as planned.

Pressure has been mounting on Transit to make the highway from Mangatawhiri to Maramarua safer, but Transit Waikato regional manager Chris Allen said while work had been earmarked to go ahead, Transit has been careful not to say it was committed to carrying it out.

A 7.2km deviation around the Mangatawhiri settlement was earmarked in Transit's 10-year plan to start this year and be completed by 2008, but Mr Allen said the $43 million needed to build the deviation had still not been committed.

He said Transit had been careful to say the work was not definitely going ahead.

"It's not a commitment in terms of a cast-iron guarantee that the project will start at that time," Mr Allen said.

"It's not a commitment, it's in our 10-year plan for a start this year but we haven't turned that into committed dollars yet."

He said the project was with Land Transport New Zealand which would decide whether funding would be approved, but Mr Allen said it was competing with many other projects.

He said the same applied to a deviation around Maramarua earmarked for a decade away.

Mr Allen said Transit had put aside $2.7 million for immediate changes in the interim.

These include a billboard campaign, removing power poles and trees from the road verges and putting in rumble strips on the highway.

National MP Paul Hutchison said the revelation was a "scandalous irresponsibility" on behalf of Transit and the Government.

"We know that lives are being lost on a regular basis that can be prevented yet there's no commitment to fix New Zealand's worst roading gauntlet," Dr Hutchison said.

At a public meeting in the Maramarua Hall on Monday night, top Auckland doctor David Adams called for median barriers to be placed along the highway.

Mr Allen said median barriers came at a cost of about $500,000 a kilometre and while some sections of the highway might be suitable, the issue would largely be resolved when the deviations were finally built.

He said the Mangatawhiri deviation would be built as an expressway so a grass verge would separate traffic and the Maramarua deviation would have a barrier.

The call for median barriers is not a new one however.

A doctor who led the campaign which saw median barriers installed along the Auckland Motorway has said he would support any new campaign with advice and assistance.

Dr Stephen Streat, intensivist at Auckland City Hospital, successfully campaigned with colleagues to get median barriers installed along the Auckland Motorway in the late 1980s, when victims of head-on crashes were filling emergency rooms.

Dr Streat said State Highway 2 was recognised as a bad stretch of highway and believed driver education and other measures were not enough to prevent deaths

As a result of the campaign he was involved in, then Prime Minister David Lange announced that median barriers would be installed on all new motorways and barriers fitted to old ones.

Barrier to accidents

* A campaign to make Auckland motorways safer started in 1987. Barriers were installed by 1992.

* In the 12 years before the barriers, 186 people died on the motorway south of Auckland.

* Between 1992 and 2004 there have been 91 deaths on that stretch of road.