Our View: Caution needed at killer crossing

As any motorist who regularly fears for their life at Rotorua's Ranolf St lights knows, traffic on Amohau St can be fast and brutal, with scant regard for something as trivial as a light just turned red.
Red-light runners are not peculiar to this crossing, or even Rotorua, but there can be few intersections where the traffic thunders through as it does by the city's skatepark.
It would be bad enough if such offenders were no more than your garden variety boy racer, but often it's a much bigger, noisier and more powerful threat - 16 tonnes, what do you get? A trucking good reason to treat that intersection with every respect.
And that's when you're in a metal shell, giving whatever protection it can.
Imagine now waiting to cross the same busy road, a few hundred metres east, and on foot.
Any pedestrian crossing should be used with full caution, but some, such as that near the Amohau and Tutanekai Sts intersection, really demand it.
But caution seems to be in short supply. Less than 24 hours after the tragic death of tourist Keunsil Lee, who was hit by a bus at the crossing, our reporter spotted 75 people crossing on a don't walk signal in a 15-minute period.
Let's do the maths - that's one every 12 seconds.
As motorists, most of us take every precaution on busy city streets, but there's little you can do to avoid someone walking or running out directly in front of your vehicle.
An overbridge, as suggested by Rotorua district councillor Mark Gould, is a great idea. This is, after all, a busy state highway.
But given wheelchair requirements and the fact the bulk of the through traffic will end up moving to the Victoria Street bypass, it may prove impractical.
In the meantime, as pedestrians, we need to respect those crossings deemed hazardous enough to require controls.
You might think there's nothing coming, but so did everyone who's been hit on that crossing.