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Source: ONE News -
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Heavy traffic is always one of the worst things about travelling
during the holiday period and on Sunday it was at its road rage
inducing worst.
Thousands of people were left stranded in their cars for hours as
key highways around the country became gridlocked.
At the Kopu Bridge in the Coromandel region, a traditional traffic
problem area, cars were backed up for kilometres.
"We had actually expected that traffic would be spread across a
number of days. We had very, very low traffic flows yesterday on
Boxing Day, presumably they were at boxing day sales or the races
and wanted to travel today," says Tommy Parker from the New Zealand
Transport Authority (NZTA).
Making things worse was an armed offenders squad callout after a man with a knife marched down the highway forcing police to close the road altogether.
Further north it was gridlock on State Highway One stretching from Puhoi to Warkworth, including the Northern Gateway Toll Road.
Thousands of cars were packed into a 20 kilometre jam. Stranded motorists ONE News spoke to on the phone say they believe closing passing lanes would have solved the problem
"It often led to driver confusion and erratic driver behaviour so we tend now not to do it. We don't believe that it would have made a significant difference had we done that," says Parker.
The NZTA is advising motorists to use State Highway 16 instead. Traffic is expected to trail off on Monday with the next busy day looking to be January 2 when normal traffic volumes double.
"We'll be repeating the same messages for January 2nd, which will be to use highway 16 and to allow additional time for your journey," says Parker.
As hard as it may be in this heat motorists are urged to try and
keep their cool.
