This week at NRC we’ve made further ground preparing for the upcoming closure of State Highway 1 in the Brynderwyns. Paula Rogers our Northland Commercial Transport Specialist, and NRC Board member Ian Newey have been out driving the detour routes, surveying suitability for heavy vehicles. And the results are positive. Thanks to NRC’s close collaboration with NZTA, they have already completed extensive improvements to the all important Paparoa – Oakleigh detour route, which will make it much safer for heavy trucks to drive (up to and including 50 Max). Ian and Paula were surprised and impressed with the improvement work already underway and completed, and we recognise and congratulate Kingston and the NZTA team for this achievement.
These are the kinds of wins our team gets out of bed for in the morning – delivering real results to our members driving the roads every day.
But we would much rather be focussing on work that will increase the productivity of road transport, rather than having to damage control road closures that should not be happening. And there is a lot of fire fighting going on across our network – not only in Northland.
This week alone we have had numerous headlines that show our underinvestment chickens are well and truly coming home to roost:
SH2 Napier to Waharoa – a $250m bill and three year wait for the Waikere Gorge realignment, a 3.9km new highway bypass
Interislander ferry replacement project – new government facing a major blowout on an already $1.45b project for two new ferries
Auckland’s critical second harbour crossing left hanging in the breeze after an eye watering $54b price tag of the previous government’s preferred option has correctly been rejected
New Plymouth District Council choosing to add fuel to the underinvestment fire by ignoring feedback and blithely proceeding with wasting ratepayer dollars on speedbumps down a main freight arterial which won’t materially improve safety outcomes but will materially harm productivity and efficiency of the freight sector
To top it off, Sean Sweeney, who’s in charge of building Auckland’s $5.5b city rail link has said that New Zealand is the most expensive country in the world to build infrastructure. We cost 4 or 5 times more than comparable infrastructure build in Europe. As a result, Auckland ratepayers are now looking forward to swallowing a $220m per year bill just to run the city rail link.
Two obvious places to start looking for savings are time-bounding our RMA consenting process (thankfully Chris Bishop is working to get this down to one year) and benchmarking our health and safety processes to global best practice in costs and outcomes.
To be able to pay the bill of our long shopping list of overdue infrastructure and damage repair, without further indebting our children and grandchildren, we are going to need the laser like focus on increasing our productivity while keeping costs down that our prime minister is promising.
I wish the new government well in this herculean task. Like many of you, I’d dearly love my children to stay in New Zealand when they start their working lives in a few short years – not moving overseas to escape eye watering debt and cost of living.
This is my last Transport Minute for year, signing off until February. I’d like to thank the team at NRC for a massive year and all their work on behalf of our members.
And lastly, I’d like to wish you a merry Christmas, and a happy break with family and loved ones.
Justin
Justin Tighe-Umbers
CEO | National Road Carriers Assn
DDI: +64 9 636 2951
