4th March 2008

Kicking my heels in town (ChCh) for a few days I notice traffic lights seem to be either packing up or maintenance being carried out. I experienced first hand yesterday the difficulties caused on main arterial routes when lights are out of action during an outage at the Innes/Papanui Rd intersection.

The lights were out during rush hour traffic on the other side of town yesterday during which a crash occurred further exacerbating the problem. Criticism of the Police has been made for not putting in an officer to direct traffic to which the Canterbury road policing manager, Inspector Erasmus has responded by telling drivers to "use their brains" when lights are not working.

This response highlights the public perception of how far the police traffic personnel are from what the ideals of being a policeman used to be. That is, not only catch crims and uphold the law, but be helpful , respectful of fellow citizens and go that extra mile to ensure safety when something unexpected crops up. Erasmus's officers are happy to cruise around all day in their blue and yellow cars looking to find fault in drivers, but a bit of point duty as a public service is obviously beneath their dignity. The excuse that "they don't have a bunch of cops sitting around ready for point duty" is a pathetic response. I'm sure he could have rounded up a dozen traffic cars in minutes had a group of boy racers been storming down Moorhouse Avenue. Erasmus shows that nothing has changed since the old days of the Transport Dept except ordinary good police officers are tarred with the same brush as traffic cops.

TC