More positive headlines this week with food and fibre exports hitting a record $65.2 billion for the year to June, up eight per cent and ahead of forecast. Dairy, meat and wool, horticulture. Our farmers and growers keep delivering, through a year of global disruption and rising input costs.
Almost every one of those dollars travels by truck at some point between farm gate and port. Record exports depend on a road network that is open when it needs to be.
Overseas tourists, our second largest export earner, also travel by road. Stats NZ data out on Wednesday shows the total number of overseas visitor arrivals are now back to within a whisker of pre-pandemic highs.
What gets measured gets managed.
This week I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Dabbs, who has come up with a smart way to measure our roading network’s resilience. Working with the Logistics Institute of New Zealand, Bill has developed a new practitioner’s guide to state highway resilience. Built on 10 years of NZTA closure data, it assessed 50 state highways and gave them a resilience score, using consistent measures such as availability (the share of days a highway is fully open) and the average time between unplanned closures. The same method can be applied to local roads. Those of you moving freight already know the network’s weak points from experience. Now there is evidence to back up the conversation.
The findings are sobering. Thirty-six of the 50 state highways and spurs assessed, 72 per cent, show declining resilience over the decade. Some of this can be attributed to the increased frequency of severe weather events the network is now having to face. But not all. The Infrastructure Commission’s National Infrastructure Plan tells us renewal spending on state highways averaged only 37 per cent of depreciation between 2012 and 2022. We have not been looking after what we’ve got.
This is a serious problem, and a solvable one.
We already know good data drives good decisions. The Road Efficiency Group, NZTA’s partnership with local councils, uses its Transport Insights platform to give road controlling authorities a common view of condition, cost and performance, steering maintenance dollars to where they make the most difference.
Now couple that with the availability and resilience data in the practitioner’s guide, and add the piece the guide itself says is still missing: what it costs when trucks are forced onto a detour. You have lived the State Highway 3 closures through the Awakino Gorge with me. Every time Taranaki is cut off from the Waikato, freight is re-routed, kilometres and driver hours mount up, and product sits waiting. That costs our economy millions of dollars. That number should be a top line in every investment case.
The data is there. What we need now is sound freight and supply chain policy, built on this evidence, driving our investment decisions. It’s simple stuff – we need to fund the routes that fail most often and cost us the most when they do.
Get that right, and our roads will keep carrying record exports to the world and give our international visitors comfortable journeys they will rave about and grow tourism further.
There is a glimmer of hope that National and Labour could work together to achieve this. In the Herald Leader’s debate on Wednesday night, Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins agreed to sit down within the first 100 days of the next term and forge a path together on major long term issues including infrastructure.
One of NRC’s six election calls is for smarter Government spending on infrastructure – so we need to hold Christopher and Chris to their pledge.
Justin
