Frankton

They are driving me insane.

When Emmanuel Cardeno's 15-minute commute from Hanley's Farm to Frankton began taking an hour in July, he was inspired to write a song.

But for Jono Brown from Lake Hayes, the traffic is no laughing matter.

The brake lights inspire rage rather than fun.

The commute now can take anywhere on a, a good day, around 30 minutes, on a bad day, up to an hour.

In the spirit of investigative journalism, RNZ took a road trip to find out how bad the traffic is.

[door beeping] It's quarter past 8:00, and I'm just about to leave Lake Hayes Estate and drive into town via Frankton.

The cars are flowing, but it's not quick.

ski?Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, we've all, um, seen the, the challenges on Frankton Road and, uh, around that Frankton area.

So, you know, there's now a mayoral task force in place.

There's gondola proposals on the table, so there is a bit of momentum behind finding a solution, but it's important that we land, you know, uh, on making some improvements, um, in the near term, um, so that we, yeah, as I say, continue to ensure that visitor experience is fantastic.

It's got to be the fastest growing sector of probably global tourism right now.

So we have this dream to create one of the world's best hot pool locations right here in Frankton, looking at over Lake Johnson up to Coronet Peak.

And with the opportunity to maybe do some more wellness-related products into the future up there, it's such a beautiful complement to what we do.

I mean, the customers we carry now will probably all go hot pooling.

Sorry, Peter, carry on.

Yeah, so the Nelson-Richmond thing is a bit like Queenstown-Frankton.

Frankton's got a flat area.

Queenstown's the more, we'd say, interesting part, similar with Nelson and Richmond.

We don't know how to do it.

How, how is Queenstown going to build its gondola from Frankton to [laughs] downtown, uh, Queenstown? It, it's ridiculous.

I'm glad, I'm glad Wayne Brown is furious

Yeah, and it's-