Australia is not a bigger New Zealand (Part 3)

In keeping with my last post, I am following the theme of roads again, and my biggest gripe with Australian roads.

Toll Roads.

I can’t believe that there is a charge to use some of the major roads in Brisbane.

In Australia, there are tolls on the main roads to the airports in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. On the main route from my sons house to the Gold Coast and the theme parks there are three toll roads. That is about $18 return. Ouch.

I hear there are no toll roads in South Australia or Western Australia. I look forward to that.

I have not paid a toll charge in New Zealand since before 1984.

Until then, the Auckland Harbour Bridge had those little booths where you had to wait three cars behind the driver who couldn’t find his wallet. When it was finally your turn, you had to find cash to pay someone who spent all day sitting in what was no better than a tall chicken coop.

That was the last I knew of toll roads until I entered Australia and the modern age of “user pays”.

Here, there are no booths and no cash changes hands. It is all done electronically.

There are cameras to record your travels, huge flashing signs, huge threatening signs and all the administration, web site developers and debt collectors that the system needs to support itself. To make it more confusing there are different toll road operators between states and even within states. No wonder the toll costs are so high.
I don’t understand. How is it that private companies can build roads on public land and then charge us all to use them? Why doesn’t the government have money to pay for roads? Taxes are as high as they have ever been.

And there are no toll roads in New Zealand.

Really?

In researching the web for this blog I made a startling discovery. There is a small toll road near Tauranga and a brand new toll road north of Auckland, New Zealand’s biggest city. There is also another planned for 2016.

I am shocked. New Zealand is not Australia, but it seems to be following some of the same paths. Too bad.

Australia is not a bigger New Zealand (Part 2)

The Roads


I keep losing my sense of direction.

Having lived all my life where the ocean is to the west, I am having trouble remembering that when the ocean is on my right I am travelling north not south. The road system does not help.

Some of the major roads have exits that swirl like spaghetti across a wide area. Heading North? Take the turn off to the West, and then follow the ring road that curves around almost 360 degrees. It reminds me of the slot car sets my kids used to have and the one steep curve that always sent the scale model cars flying off the track. Hold on tight to your seatbelts people.

Going South? Turn left and follow the side street until you hit the motorway going in the other direction. Sorry we forgot to put up the new sign but you will work it out.

There are always road works to make it even more confusing. Half the cost of road works must be due to all the associated chaos that goes with it. It is common to see two police cars (flashing lights), ten trucks (rotating hazard lights) and several trucks with movie screen sized messages (in flashing lights of course) with two thousand orange cones and a dozen road signs.

In New Zealand, I can tell I am coming up to road works when I see the dust cloud made by two graders and a truck. Sometimes I miss it completely until I see a sign saying “End of Road works”.

Australia has much more land area so when the workers leave, the new road may not be in the same place as the old. This confuses my GPS. In one perfectly straight section of motorway, my GPS always pictures me driving through nearby fields and nags me to re-join the motorway at once.

The funniest thing was watching the screen as I drove over the new Gateway Bridge. The GPS had not yet heard about the bridge and had me driving into the clear blue of the river. It was lost for words.

My GPS has been a lifesaver but it gets annoying the third time it tells me I have to go straight through at the next roundabout and I find myself muttering “I know, I know, enough already.”
I have now set the language to Spanish. “En dos kilómetros, en el glorienda, vaya todo derecho” sounds much less annoying and may come in handy when I finally get to explore South America.