Editorial: Grumbles about the rumbles

OPINION: Any motorist who has momentarily strayed off the straight and narrow and encountered a state highway rumble strip will appreciate what a wake-up call it is.

The juddering is an effective warning that your vehicle is in the wrong place and the strips have no doubt saved hundreds, if not thousands, of motorists from dozing off.

According to the New Zealand Transport Agency's statistics accident rates have dropped substantially since the introduction of rumble strips five years ago.

Rumble strips consist of raised road markings on road edges and centre lines, cunningly designed to give motorists a fright by making as much noise as possible without doing any damage.

Traffic engineers love rumble strips as a low-tech, low-cost but high impact way to make the highways safer. With its long, straight stretches of highway, Canterbury has become a rumble strip mecca.

But the fright motorists get when they drive over the strips is nothing compared to the noise they make if you are unlucky enough to live beside, or have a business within earshot, of a rumble strip.

To those close by the noise is akin to living next to a runaway concrete mixer that can start up any time around the clock. On first hearing, it sounds like a passing vehicle has a blown a tyre or four out.

In South Canterbury Makikihi local Jacqui Butler is leading the grumble against the rumble and it seems she has tapped a rich vein of complaint.

Mrs Butler has already successfully campaigned to get more than 100m of rumble strips removed from around her business but wants a rethink on rumble strips altogether.

The transport agency, to its credit, has shown a flexible approach and addressed Mrs Butler's concerns by removing the strips.

The strips issue pits the rights of local residents squarely against the question of the greater public good. It is hard, if not impossible, to argue that any roading improvement that saves lives – as the transport agency believes rumble strips have – were not a good idea.

Critics of the strips would argue that it was just as hard to prove conclusively that rumble strips have directly resulted in the reduction in fatal accidents since there have been a large number of other road safety campaigns and improvements over the same five year period.

Given the preventive nature of the strips it would be impossible to prove how much good they have done.

Rumble strips have their place but should never be installed anywhere that has a noise impact on country residents. Given our vast stretches of highway, we still leave plenty of scope for using rumble strips to make our roads safer, without penalising anyone other than a few sheep and cows.

- © Fairfax NZ News