I‘m pleased to start off with a bouquet to Road Science and its technical manager Darcy Rogers.

This week NBR ran a story, Crumbling roads: the bitumen problem bites. One of the issues Mr. Rogers points out is that New Zealand is a small player when it comes to importing bitumen, accounting for about 0.16% of global demand. That makes us price takers with little negotiating power as to the quality and price of the product of its landed product.

Mr. Rogers said that when surfacing roads their aim was to provide the best mix and surfaces for specific conditions, including geographies and weather patterns. The colder, the more flexible they could be, but that the surface could also “bleed” during summer, so it is a balancing act.

He also said: “But if you see poor road conditions, particularly at high traffic areas, you can be sure we didn’t get it quite right.”

Why I want to celebrate this is because too often, and for too long, people jump to a misperception that trucks are the main cause of road damage. Quality sealing of the pavement structure beneath it is critical to the performance and life of the road. So it’s good to have the experts come out and acknowledge some of the real underlying problems. Until that discussion is more widely held it’s unlikely we’ll ever get improvements.

Advocacy

Advocacy-wise it was a busy week and you may find the range of issues we’re dealing with interesting.

We completed our formal submission to the Ministry of Education on Vocational Education and Training (VET).

The road transport sector is not as advanced or mature as the motor trade in work-based training to nationally recognised qualification levels, whereas the latter has a long history of successful apprenticeships and national qualifications. So we’ve been in talks with MITO and the Motor Trade Association (MTA) about its views on the future and we formally supported the MTA submission.

The current VET system is convoluted and unnecessarily complex. On behalf of the road freight industry Transporting New Zealand administers the Road to Success work-based training system and I can tell you from personal experience that it is an absolute nightmare trying to navigate the many parties such as Ministry of Education, ITPs, WDCs, NIAGs, TEC, NZQA and a raft of other agencies and working groups that have their fingers in that particular pie.

There is no doubt Transporting New Zealand agrees that the complexity of the current system has contributed to inconsistencies in training, and in the poor use and results of the money invested by government and sector in training. Our points on what needs to be fixed have been made and it’ll be interesting to see what happens.

Tolling

The other big announcement was the beginning of public consultation on tolling three roads, Ōtaki to north of Levin (O2NL), Takitimu North Link in Tauranga, and Te Ahu a Turanga the Manawatū Tararua Highway.

We’ll be asking members for feedback on these but our first impression is one of concern whether enough information has been provided to enable any useful consideration of the proposals. Requests for qualitative data underpinning the proposed pricing will be treated by NZTA as formal requests made under the Official Information Act and that may mean getting the information could take some time. The recently released NLTP showed there’s a significant funding gap and tolling is one way of raising revenue so we’ll be urging NZTA to provide what’s needed so an informed decision can be made.

From what I saw and heard at our industry meeting with Transport Minister Simeon Brown this week, I think he’ll be very disappointed if the opportunity to have meaningful consultation doesn’t happen.

Playground bureaucracy

At the other end of the scale, we are dealing with an issue in Cave which is a town located in the Timaru district about 23km north-west of Timaru on SH8. It had an estimated population of 90 as of June 2023.

The tiny settlement is very close to, but just off SH8. A playground has been constructed on the small parcel of land between the settlement’s main street Elizabeth St and SH8. Consequently, that’s increased the risk that a child could venture from the playground and be struck by a vehicle.

To manage that risk, traffic calming treatments have been installed to reduce vehicle speed to 30km/h. SH8 has a 100km/h speed limit and is equidistant on the other side of the playground. So to us it appears that a much better solution would’ve been to fence the playground and stop kids running out onto either road. But one road’s a local road and the other is a state highway so there are differences in responsibility and accountability. This is another example where common sense and the basics of good risk management are being crazily trumped by other factors.

The traffic treatments also include narrowing the seal width of the lanes to 3m and 3.4m at the eastern and western ends of Elizabeth St respectively. Transport operators and agricultural contractors are being expected to avoid using that section of the street and its disappointing that there appears to be a complete lack of consideration of the impacts on those sectors despite how much they do to support the community.

We need to take a more balanced approach to safety and productivity. We’ve asked the local council to halt its works and reconsider its plans. We need to stop our roads being experimental test beds for trialling novel traffic designs and installations.

– By Dom Kalasih, interim chief executive, Ia Ara Aotearoa Transporting New Zealand