Taranaki’s “Kiwi Road” – expensive but essential? 2023

In 2017 the Taranaki Daily News described Kiwi Rd as “a mostly-gravel road running through some of Taranaki’s most spectacular and isolated countryside”. It is also very expensive to maintain. At the time, the annual $40,000 annual maintenance cost was calculated to work out at about $10 per day for each of the ten cars that used the remote road. By comparison, Tukapa St in New Plymouth was used by 4,500 cars per day.

The first newspaper reports mentioning the formation of Kiwi Rd date back to 1909. However, in July of that year the dispirited Makarakia Valley correspondent wrote that “Kiwi Rd work, like other back-blocks roads, is at a standstill”. The local MP stepped in and a year later the Waitara correspondent happily reported that Kiwi Rd had been completed (at least in part) and would mean “much increased business for the town”. Four years later work began on the Kiwi Rd tunnel to provide access through to Okau Rd. ‘Broken through’ in July 1914, it was not until the end of 1915 that the 154-metre tunnel was ready for regular use.

Although there is nothing to confirm the particular reason for Kiwi as the name for this out-of-the-way road, it was likely a choice acknowledging the presence of the western brown kiwi in this part of Taranaki.

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