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Traffic signal improvements to the Kawarau Falls single lane bridge, to meet Transit NZ safety and efficiency requirements, to allow the side road to access the State Highway for the development of the Kawarau Falls project.

This project required liaison between consultants in Auckland, Dunedin, Queenstown and Christchurch to achieve the desired outcome. The developer required Transit NZ and Queenstown Lake District Council consent to modify the signals across the bridge. This project was carried out with Baseplus as the sub-consultant for Paramics microsimulation modelling.

When the new Bunnings site on Marshland Road was developed, traffic signals were needed to ensure safe site access. ViaStrada was engaged to undertake the design off traffic signals for the new Bunnings site, and upgrading an adjacent existing signalised intersection (Briggs / Lake Terrace / Marshland) that is affected by the development.

SH7 and Fairhall Road intersection design for the Kaiata industrial park. This required a specialist intersection design catering for heavy commercial vehicles (HCVs) on a high speed State Highway environment.

Bike path users in Melbourne can often find it difficult to find their way around on the many off-road paths around the city. Hence, a review of the adequacy of signposting was required.

The trouble was, VicRoads staff never got lost; they knew their way around. So Christchurch-based ViaStrada was called in. If a foreigner could find his way around, the signposting would be fine. Or maybe the theory was that if a Kiwi bloke could navigate the routes, then a normal Melburnian would have no problems.

ARRB Group (Melbourne) ran two-day workshops on "planning and developing walking and cycling strategies" in Australia and NZ. Andrew Macbeth teamed up with ARRB to develop content and deliver (with an ARRB co-presenter) the NZ workshops in Wellington and Christchurch.

A discussion paper on a proposed national road classification system (NRCS) or road hierarchy was prepared in mid July 2003 by Andrew Macbeth (at that stage, working for MWH New Zealand Ltd) with input on drafts from Transfund NZ and Transit NZ. The discussion paper was distributed to all road controlling authorities and other interested parties. Recipients were advised of the project, invited to respond to a survey about the proposed NRCS and invited to attend one of a series of five workshops held throughout New Zealand to discuss the proposed NRCS.

The purpose of this review was to identify whether the integrity of the original proposal for three off-road cycle paths from Waitakere City Council (one of the 7 councils in the Auckland region), as reviewed and approved by Infrastructure Auckland, had been retained in the current tender drawings. ARTA also required advice on whether it should approve construction for the Lower Waikumete Path, the Oratia Stream Path, and the Lower Opanuku Path.

This study built on previous work by ViaStrada with assistance at different stages by Beca and MWH. The premise is that a cycle route provides a certain level of service to potential users if it lies within a certain distance of them, whether they be residents at their homes, school or university students at their schools or people at work. Cycle routes should be provided first in areas of highest "demographic density" to achieve the "best bang for the buck".

Life is so much easier when you can work with a great team of dedicated and professional people. Such was the case with this project. For Northlands Mall, we were commissioned to explore access options and designs through to obtaining Resource Consent from the City Council.

ViaStrada was engaged by ARTA to develop a tool to convert short-term manual cycle counts to "annual average daily traffic" (AADT) estimates of cycle traffic. The methodology used standard pneumatic traffic counters with softer than normal rubber road tubes for detecting cycles.

Cycle traffic was counted at five sites around Auckland, with counts undertaken continuously for up to two weeks. In addition, manual counts commissioned by ARTA and undertaken by Gravitas during March 2007 were used to verify the reliability of the automatic counts and to help develop the tool.