I was not particularly surprised when I read an article in the Daily Mail newspaper that said the UK Highways Agency spends £114,000 building each and every zebra crossing!http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=489962&in_page_id=1770 You have to conclude that to spend over NZ$300,000 on a zebra crossing, the POM's must be over engineering their traffic schemes or simply wasting their (your!) money.
Thankfully Kiwi's do things rather differently and take a minimalist approach when designing zebra crossings.
Two dropped kerbs, a bit of white paint for the road markings, two striped poles with a reflective liminus round flat disk at the top facing the direction of on-coming traffic and the job is done. There is no electrical work, nor is there an annual electricity bill to pay and lets not forget there are no associated CO2 emissions that contribute to gobal warming either! The one pictured above is a deluxe model and has a third pole - it comes complete with a pedestrian safety island!
Kiwi zebra crossings work just as well as UK zebra's but they cost well under £114,000! I would be surprised if this one cost more than NZ$15,000, that's just over £5,000!
No wonder my council rates are so low!
1 comment:
Congratulations on your interesting website - but don't make it sound too good out there - or you might end up with half of Holme emigrating and living down the road from you.
I particularly enjoyed hearing about your horrendous traffic problems. Hope you and family have a good time.
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