Photo: RNZ / Patrice Allen
A roading engineer has admitted he did not check the safety of an intersection, where two people died, when he visited it for an inspection just months before the crash.
Jayde Cummings and Steve Macnee died when the vehicles they were in collided on the outskirts of Dunedin in September 2019.
An inquest into their deaths is before Coroner Marcus Elliott in Dunedin this week.
Cummings, 15, was a passenger in a ute driven by a then 17-year-old friend on 17 September 2019.
The boy drove through a stop sign controlled intersection just out of Outram - about 25 kilometres from central Dunedin - and collided with a car driven by Macnee.
The boy did not remember the crash and Cummings and Macnee died.
The question before the coroner was whether the signage and warnings in the area were appropriate, and whether the young driver had a chance to see them due to vegetation obscuring them.
Just three months before the crash, nearby resident Judy Reid raised concerns with the Dunedin City Council about overgrown vegetation obscuring the view of the road.
"I noted that the hedge was so overgrown that it was hard to see oncoming traffic at the intersection of Huntly and Church Road West. I advised I thought it should be trimmed back," she said.
The Dunedin City Council sent a graduate roading engineer to the intersection and less than a month later advised Reid they did not believe there was an issue.
"I replied that same day noting I disagreed with the findings," Reid told the inquest.
"To support my position, I advised that when my husband gets into that corner in his grader, he has to get the grader one-quarter of the way onto the road to be able to see. In addition, I noted that the next corner down on Church Road East and Granton Road was always cut back and not as busy."
The roading engineer - who had name suppression - gave evidence to the inquest this morning.
In response to questions from the counsel assisting the coroner Rebekah Jordan about whether the engineer assessed the safety of the intersection or just the vegetation and impacts on sightlines at the intersection, he conceded he did not assess its broader safety.
"No... at that time I didn't know even the road safety aspect role too much. I was just eight months maybe with my role there in council," he said.
"So when you visited this intersection you weren't looking at it through a lens of road safety," Jordan asked.
"Just as a general driver I looked at it. I didn't look at a specific road safety engineering aspect of it."
The engineer admitted if he was sent to do a similar inspection now, he would take a far broader view of the intersection's safety.
A photograph taken by an Otago Daily Times' photographer on the day of the crash - which formed part of the evidence at the teenage driver's trial - showed the two stop signs at the intersection partially obscured by vegetation.
They were also smaller than the recommended size.
There was no evidence the teenage driver had attempted to brake before going through the intersection and he was likely travelling between 60 and 76 kilometres per hour.
The impact of the crash was so powerful, it frayed Macnee's seatbelt and tore the seatbelt's tongue from its buckle.
Serious crash analyst Constable Jack McGilbert told the inquest he thought the 100 kilometre per hour speed limit in the area could be halved to improve the intersection's safety.
"I was quite surprised that this road was an open road - 100k," he said.
"I suggested stopping at 100k into a stop sign could be quite a task if you don't realise it's an intersection. So one [possible safety improvement] is prior to the intersection maybe have a speed limit of 50."
The inquest was expected to conclude tomorrow.
