Auto Gossip

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32874, 24 March 1972, Page 14

Auto Gossip

I b Y

A. J. P.

Not motorway Motorways are a gooc thing when it comes tc providing rapid and safe routes from one point tc another, although when 1 am driving for enjoymeni rather than for just tran. sport, I prefer to use minoi roads. But our authorities should make sure that they call roads “motorways” only when they are motorways, and not just limited access roads. To my mind, a motorway must have more than one lane in either direction, and traffic moving in opposite directions must be separated by some physical median or barrier, not just a strip of white paint. As well as this, of course, entry must be limited tc motor-vehicles, there should be no cross-roads, and sc on. If you accept these parameters—and I am sure most people would—then there is no excuse for calling that limited access road intc Dunedin a motorway, nor is it correct to call the beginning of Christchurch’s main northern entry route at Pinehaven “motorway.”

Confusion The road from Pinehaven south is, for some distance, just ordinary, two-lane highway. I do not know if anyone has yet tried to use the "right-hand lane" under the misapprehension that there were two lanes running the other way over the countryside somewhere, but it would not be hard to do. Later, of course, the road does become a true motorway. But in its present form, the first section can never be a motorway—it is a limited access two-lane highway. Mobile road-block When I was cruising along the motorway-part of the northern access road last week-end, I encountered . a great argument for

making the right-hand lane a “fast” lane, and restricting slow traffic to the inside lane. There, plodding along in the right-hand lane, was an old truck, one of its dual rear tyres flat, and a rusty old bulldozer on its deck. The speed cannot have been above 20 m.p.h. Slowly starting to pull level with this road-block, in the inside lane, was a car and caravan combination. Following traffic had to screech down to less than 20 m.p.h. while the caravan slowly passed the truck, and the two of them blocked the roadway. To be sure, there would still have been some hold-up if the truck had been in the left lane, and the caravan had passed by moving to the right lane. But I am sure the situation would have been less hazardous for other traffic. Come to think of it, perhaps such very slow traffic should be banned from motorways completely, by the imposition of a minimum speed limit. Motorways, I am sure, are no place for 20 m.p.h. trucks.