Traffic control worries young mother

A Rotorua resident is unhappy about the lack of police presence at intersections when traffic lights are down in the city.

The Rotorua mother, who did not want to be named, said she was worried about the safety of her 3-year-old child when driving through the intersection of Malfroy and Old Taupo Rds yesterday. The traffic lights at the intersection had been out since Thursday night.

The woman said by yesterday afternoon there was still no measures in place to direct traffic, which was completely unsafe.

"I'm really sick of it," she said. "It makes sense to me to have someone take care of the situation."

She said, from her experience, it was quite common to see traffic lights down in Rotorua without police guiding traffic through safely.

"In Brisbane there is no way that would happen, there is always someone out directing traffic when the lights are out."

Rotorua police Sergeant Chris McLeod said they had been monitoring the intersection throughout the day and were happy with driver behaviour.

He said whenever traffic lights were out in Rotorua the police would generally monitor the traffic. If it was busy, and there was a lot of confusion, they would step in and direct traffic.

"The common sense rule is to go back to ordinary road rules, so the right hand rule."

Mr McLeod said they did not step in yesterday because most drivers were sticking to the right hand rule.

The lights at the intersection were expected to be out until early this morning, with the cause of the outage being a control box fire.

Rotorua District Council group manager infrastructure services Andrew Bell said contractors were waiting on a part to fix the control box.

He said the contractors had set up cones and signs yesterday afternoon to assist traffic until the control box was fixed, hopefully by today.