Stricter rules may be placed on truck drivers in the Gore district after a review of its roading bylaw later this year.
The council’s new policy and regulatory committee talked about restricting where truck drivers can park and which roads they can take at its first meeting last Tuesday.
In a report tabled by roading asset manager Murray Hasler, he said the council needed to review its existing roading bylaw from 2011.
‘‘The council will also need to consider . . .issues which have developed or become problems since the bylaw was commenced.
‘‘Some examples of these issues include prohibition of overnight parking of heavy commercial vehicles in urban residential streets [and] potential prohibition of heavy commercial vehicles from certain urban residential streets unless they have legitimate business on these streets.’’
These were issues in both Gore and Mataura and had been the subject of public complaints.
‘‘It also causes damage to our roads.
‘‘A lot of our residential streets . . .are not built to have loaded logging [trucks parked] up overnight.
‘‘There is a real cost as well as annoyance and inconvenience to the public.’’
Such restrictions were already in place in Cromwell and other Central Otago townships.
Cr Keith Hovell said he also had concerns over truck drivers using the district’s rural gravel roads as a way to bypass state highways.
Mr Hasler said the Southland district was a good example of where this had already been restricted.
Cr Glenys Dickson said there were a lot of truck drivers in Gore and she did not want to stop them from coming into town.
‘‘If we don’t provide an area for trucks to park, where would you expect them to be parking?’’
Mr Hasler said there were streets zoned commercial and industrial that they could use, but really it was the responsibility of the trucking companies rather than the council.
‘‘There’s quite a bit of cost involved in providing those sorts of facilities.
‘‘In some other places . . . trucking companies that don’t have a base or a yard in a particular town make an arrangement with another company to allow the trucks to park overnight.’’
However, some of the drivers parking at Coster Park in Mataura lived in the town, an issue that was also raised at last Monday’s Mataura community board meeting, he said.
Industry association Transporting New Zealand told him ‘‘it’s basically laziness on part of the truck drivers in a lot of cases, wanting to park outside their house overnight rather than parking the truck in a yard’’.
Other necessary changes to the roading bylaw included the setting of speed limits, which had since become centralised, and the encroachment of permanent fencing in some rural areas.
Cr Dickson also raised concerns with the Streets Alive project, which brought about a series of controversial roading changes trialled in 2021.
‘‘A lot of the Streets Alive infrastructure is still on the roads and quite a number of the public are commenting about it and would like it cleaned up.’’
Initially named the policy and planning committee, members passed a motion by chairman Keith Hovell to have it renamed ‘‘after considering the functions of the committee’’.
