Dangerous intersection becomes statistically safe
It seems that traffic planners require blood sacrifices in the way of fatal accident statistics before they will deem an intersection to be officially dangerous and therefore worthy of remediation.
What these people obviously fail to realise is that sometimes an intersection is so obviously dangerous that it is studiously avoided by the majority of drivers and thus becomes statistically safe.
Not wishing to boast but I have driven in many different countries and cities around the world including London, New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and even Sydney.
However I can't remember a more ludicrously dangerous intersection than one right here on the Peninsula.
The intersection of Rawson Rd and Railway St, right before the railway crossing, is the one I'm referring to.
It can be nothing short of a nightmare for drivers trying to turn right from Railway St into Rawson Rd, heading towards Woy Woy Rd.
A driver in this situation has to give way to traffic from three different directions - from the left and right on Rawson Rd and straight ahead from Railway St.
Not only that, they are also forced to ratchet their head around to a totally unnatural angle, reminiscent of "The Exorcist", to check for traffic coming from the left.
As can be seen on Google maps the angle is so acute that, depending on the design of your car, you can find yourself looking through the rear passenger window.
If your driving a van or some other vehicle without a rear passenger window you can find yourself unable to see traffic coming from the left at all.
I have witnessed more than one near miss at this intersection due to drivers focusing so completely on the difficult left and right check that they completely forgot about head-on traffic.
Of course the result of this situation is that most sensible drivers wishing to travel up Woy Woy Rd towards the motorway will ignore the more direct route and the well meaning instructions of Google navigation, and use a route that brings them to this intersection via Rawson Rd rather than Railway St.
By doing this they then have right of way at the intersection.
Of course this does rather skew the figures on other intersections that facilitate this strategy.
The main one that comes to mind is the Ocean Beach Rd intersection with Rawson Rd.
What's that I hear you say?
Oh! So they're spending about a gazillion dollars on that intersection to "fix" things.
Hmm!
SOURCE:
Email, 23 Jan 2022
Frank Wiffen, Woy Woy