Funding for two Cameron Road roundabouts to be replaced with traffic lights has been approved as part of the recent Long Term Plan approvals.

The ‘two worst intersections' are at Ninth Ave/Cameron Road and Chadwick Road/Cameron Road.

The Chadwick Road roundabout will be replaced with traffic lights.

They are both suffering from a combination of small roundabouts and large traffic flows, says Tauranga City Council transportation manager Martin Parkes.

'It's just simply because of the volume of traffic that's trying to move round it,” says Martin. 'What happens is one or two arms of the roundabout tend to dominate the flow onto the roundabout. That then creates problems for the other arms. People take chances trying to get onto the circulating area and that's when crashes occur.”

Replacing the Ninth Ave roundabout has been on the cards for years, says Martin.

He says it's always been a problem intersection, it's always had a relatively high crash record with a number of personal injuries.

'It's always been an intersection that we have kept a close eye on, and it's been in previous ten year plans to do some work on. It's just got to that point now where we feel it's an opportune time to put things right and make it safer for everybody.

'Not just cars drivers, but pedestrians, cyclists, mobility scooter users, it's just basically the time has come to do some work on it.”

The work on both intersections is expected to take place in the 2016/17 financial year.

'This year we're working on the design, getting it safety audited and getting it finalised. We will be putting it out to tender early next financial year,” says Martin.

'We still have quite a bit of work to do on it. We haven't even got a base design yet. We are just starting that at the moment.”

It means Cameron Road will have two more sets of traffic lights and seven sets of lights on the intersections between Ninth Avenue and Gate Pa.

'It's not an issue for us,” says Martin. 'We monitor the performance of Cameron Road every day through our traffic control centre. There are cameras at every single intersection. We know how Cameron road is performing and currently it's performing how we want.

'We know that at certain times of the day, the evening peak, there are some issues but it's for such a short period of time it's currently not a major concern for us.

'The message to the public is if they want to travel the whole length of Cameron Road they will get held up from time to time. If they don't want to be held up there is a lovely road called Route K that they can use.”