Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

The big news this week: I found a street open in the CBD to drive on. It was so good to find a road open for traffic, I drove it twice, just to be sure.

I'd like to tell you which one it is, but if word gets out to our 140,000 readers, you all might rush to experience the novelty of finding a driveable, cone-less inner city street and ruin the moment.

It was an exciting discovery, since all the other roads are closed, except the one-way streets.

And they are always one-way in the opposite direction you want to go in.

That's part of Murphy's Law - that you will be on the wrong end of a one-way street; surrounded by closed blocks. You may recall Murphy was the guy who accurately predicted that toast will always fall to the floor butter-side down. Murphy has progressed a long way since his kitchen-based prophesising and now specialises in traffic management.

It's as if someone is playing a game of 'let's see how many streets of a city we can block off before it all grinds to a halt?” A sort of metropolitan version of 'how many legs can you yank off a spider before it can't walk?”

What logic

To the average ratepayer, there doesn't seem to be much logic applied to this mayhem in the CBD. I'm sure our mates at City Hall know a whole lot more about the science of traffic control and have their good reasons.

Although I haven't forgiven them for the ludicrous decision to make McLean a one way street, so that all the Sun Media cars and our neighbours have to do an extra round of several (mostly closed) city blocks, just to leave the office. Which, ironically, is adding to the congestion, confusion and frustration.

The idea of making it one-way was to avoid supposed accidents at the corner of Willow. But all we've achieved is that the idiots who were previously going to smash at Willow and McLean, now do their crashing at Willow and Harington - when it's open, that is.

If there ever was a problem, it's merely been shifted down a block or three.

Of course the statistics will tell a different story. They will show that the crash rate is down. Because the traffic is now so snarled up, no one can get a proper run at each other.

In the ten years we've been operating from The Strand, we've never seen an accident at McLean Street. Although there have been some doozies at some of the other intersections.

You can't miss them. It sounds like a plane load of cats crashing into a tambourine factory.

And it's only going to get worse.

SunLive reports the section of Hamilton Street, between Durham and Willow, is closed for a year to allow construction of a new parking building and bike hub.

Traffic chaos

Construction seems to be the main cause of this inner city traffic chaos. But another contributor is the lumbering, mostly empty, big yellow buses that trundle around.

Some of them are too big to even get around the downtown corners. I followed one trying to turn left off Chapel by the Armitage, and it couldn't get around the corner without steamrolling the curb.

Now either the buses are too big or the corners are too tight. Someone's got it wrong.

Meanwhile, the long-suffering drivers are backed up behind these mostly empty behemoths, as they jam themselves into the intersections like a fat man in economy.

Over-the-top health and safety ‘precautions' require a gazillion orange cones and two gazillion hi-viz persons stooging around cordoning off every footpath and road within sight, in case someone stubs a toe on a loose brick.

It means that a lot more of the street is sucked up with fences, cones and safety paraphernalia.

Have we become a nation of overly cautious worriers?

Then, of course, just when you think it couldn't get any worse, Murphy throws a festival, a parade and freight trains into the mix.

As if the constricted traffic wasn't bad enough, down come the barriers across level crossings such as The Strand or Sulphur Point and there's a whole new congestion headache.

If the trains conveyed passengers then they might actually help ease congestion, as it would mean fewer cars. But we only have freight trains, so no advantage there for the beleaguered city traveller.

One visitor to Sun Media this week gave up trying to get to our office. She phoned to say she'd given up after doing the rounds several times over.

On the bike

Determined to find a solution to the traffic comedy, I decided to get on the bicycle, thinking that might be a sustainable, healthy and rewarding answer to traffic congestion.

Well between the winter weather and the psychopathic attitudes of Tauranga drivers, I'm lucky to be alive. Not to mention the risk of suffering trouser entrapment in the chain, despite the application of industrial-strength bicycle clips. The trouble with biking is that some morph into a different sort of road idiot. First there's lycra then a camera on your head.

Next is chanting about Road Rights as you overtake on the left and run red lights.

It's all downhill from there.

Try walking downtown. Dodging the foliage and the ever-increasing footpath signage that means two couples can't pass in opposite directions and the encroaching billboards, fences, plants and advertising hoardings turn what should be a simple downtown stroll, into a pentathlon.

And it can only get worse, as more construction is planned for a rapidly re-developing CBD.

Our only hope is Elon Musk can deliver affordable flying cars.