New Zealand: Road Works

[rsc]

One thing I didn't mention in my post about driving was the prevalence of road construction, or "works" as the signs call it. We seemed to encounter a lot of repaving activity, which may be related to the fact that, for all the scary aspects of some of the roads, bad pavement was not among them; NZ seems to take road maintenance seriously.

I was amused by the politeness of some of the signs. Where flagmen were active, there would be a sign saying "Please stop on request", as if you had an option (can you imagine such a sign in the US with the word "please" on it?), and at the end of the construction zone there would often be not just a sign saying "works end" but another one beneath it saying "thank you".

They use a paving method (now out of fashion hereabouts) that involves spreading gravel over a newly-tarred road, so that a recently-paved road has a lot of loose gravel on it (about which signs give appropriate warning, with graphics). By the way, the process we call "paving" is called "sealing" in NZ, so these gravelled stretches generally bear the warning "New Seal".

This caused some amusement in Napier, where our sea-view room also looked out over the street that runs along the beach, which had in fact been recently sealed, so there was a "New Seal" sign right below our balcony. Not too far along the beach there was a small "Marineland" attraction, and on occasion we could hear the barking of what I presume was a not particularly new seal.

Comments

[susandennis]

I love that you wrote about their road construction. It fascinated us! We were coming across the South Island going west at one point when we were stopped by a flag guy. There were about 4 cars in front of us and the people were out of their cars roaming around so we got out. And quickly learned that this little stop would be at least an hour!!! We were in no hurry. It was a beautiful day and it was atop a hill with a gorgeous view but we could not help but be amused at what would happen if they tried that over here!

The waiting group got a little bigger as cars pulled in behind us and we all got quite friendly and then this one guy went back to his car and pulled out his bag pipes and gave us a concert! I hate the sound of bagpipes but this was so magical I couldn't even considered being annoyed. My friend, John, got the most wonderful picture of the guy and it hangs prominately over my desk - you can even see it in this computer picture.

From lj

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Nothing like that happened to us on this trip -- we never had to wait for more than a couple of cars (it seemed to me that the waits at traffic lights in the cities were longer). But I recall something like that happening on another trip not too long ago -- I think it might have been during our several traverses of the Cascades a couple of summers ago (and I'm not talking about the two-hour traffic jam on I-90 around Snoqualmie Pass). No bagpipers, but a long enough delay for everyone to get out and stretch their legs.

[susandennis]

Really? A planned road closure? Wow.

The road work we ran into in New Zealand had been planned. We thought it was emergency road repair but turns out they do this often and with no notice to anyone even though they can tell you months ahead of time when a highway will be closed for hours on end. We asked about why they didn't use detours and detour signs and they thought we were whacked.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

We did actually encounter one detour around a section of closed road -- probably some piece of Highway 1 north of Auckland (after it had ceased to be a Motorway). There were also signs on some of the major through roads indicating that various sections were "Open", with the clear possibility that they could have said something else; these were roads through mountainous areas that could well have been problematic in winter.