In a road marking fiasco, Auckland Transport's being called out for painting white road markings onto dirt next to the road which could easily be removed by the elements or hand - not once, but twice.
Workers clearly didn't bother sweeping the edge of the road before carrying out the task. Then after a video of the blunder went viral, they went back but it's the same issue.
Road safety campaigner Geoff Upson shared video on Friday of the blunder on Oyster Point Road in Kaukapakapa, north of Auckland, which has since been viewed over 2 million times.
In the video, he's seen using one hand to easily remove the white paint on top of dirt, sticks and leaves.
Auckland Transport saw the video and went back to fix the mistake.
But the same issue happened again - the markings were painted on the dirt a second time.
Upson told AM on Tuesday he was "extremely dumbfounded".
"This has become such a widespread problem, the media's picked it up, it's gone international."
Upson, who has appeared on overseas media about the blunder, said he was still not happy with the apparent fix.
"Somebody's come out and 'swept the road again'," he said, doing quote marks with his hands. "But unfortunately they haven't swept it well enough to clear that mud off the road so that mud is still lodged on top of the road and then they've painted on top of that layer of mud again."
Demonstrating with his hand, Upson said there was about 3cm of mud and dirt underneath the new white line.
"I think the best thing to do at this point would be to get somebody high up at Auckland Transport, perhaps even the chief executive Dean Kimpton, to front the media and explain how the process has gone wrong here."
The ordeal comes after Upson contacted Auckland Transport about faded road markings in January.
On January 8, he said he got an email about the roads being swept - he claims they hadn't - then on February 9 there was a truck on site sweeping the roads.
But that method "didn't work unfortunately", Upson said.
"The method they've used, you know, it's the big truck with the big roller on front and, I mean, that's a great method for clearing loose stones off a roading project or something like that but unfortunately that method doesn't get close enough to the edge.
"It's also just gone overtop of the mud so that big roller, that big sweeper roller on the front of trucks, it simply hasn't done the job of clearing that layer of mud… and it was quite solid so it needed a bit more of a mechanical, a water blaster might have worked, but I used a spade."
Upson described how he went along the road edge with a spade and lifted the mud off "quite easily".
So, he contacted Auckland Transport yet again. On Monday night, he got an email response that they're "going to look into it".
"Where it goes from here I don't know."
An Auckland Transport spokesperson told Newshub it was first made aware of this on Friday.
"Our contractor is responsible for maintaining the visibility of the road markings and whenever these fade or are done incorrectly, they will rectify as soon as possible - at no extra cost to AT," the spokesperson said.
But Tāmaki Makaurau isn't the only region with road marking issues.
An AM viewer sent in a shocking photo from near Rotorua - white markings painted over road kill.
"They've literally painted right over the top of a possum," the viewer said.
"We digress, you should not be painting white lines over anything that is not the road," AM host Melissa Chan-Green said.
