People will rightly be deeply sceptical about trying to engage by phone with an anonymous and remote bureaucracy, knowing they’re likely to be left hanging on the line for ages before anyone answers – and that their complaint will go nowhere anyway, disappearing into a yawning black hole. People are profoundly distrustful of hotlines, and with good reason.
And perhaps it’s just as well if no one bothers using the service. Given that it’s hard to drive more than 10 km on any state highway without seeing forests of road cones, interminable temporary speed limit signs and traffic management trucks holding up traffic, often for no discernible reason, the line would be clogged 24/7.
More to the point, however, the hotline is a contemptible copout that places the onus on us citizens to deal with the problem of sclerotic, cone-choked roads when the real responsibility lies with the politicians themselves.
They allowed the traffic management monster to run rampant and it’s their responsibility to cut it down to size, starting with a root-and-branch cleanout of the New Zealand Transport Agency from board level down – which would mean defenestrating the chair, former National Party leader Simon Bridges – and the imposition of a new corporate culture that emphasises consideration for road users ahead of do-nothing jobs and profits for the traffic management racketeers.
Prime minister Christopher Luxon and Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden (whose title gives you a rather large clue to where things started going wrong) both admit that excessive traffic management is a plague upon the land.
“You can drive around this country at different times of the day and you’ve got whole roads shut down, no one is doing any work and the cones are frankly just clogging up the joint,” Luxon said at his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday.
Setting aside the fact that no politician should ever feel the need to use that flatulent and empty word “frankly” in an attempt to sound tough, since we’re entitled to assume they’re always expressing their genuine opinion, we should probably at least be grateful that Luxon has finally cottoned on to an issue that’s been driving New Zealand road users mad with frustration for years.
For her part, Van Velden says the issue of a “sea of cones” was brought up at almost every public meeting she attended on a recent road trip. So why has it taken so long for the government to wake up, and why it has responded with such a timid, half-arsed response?
Instead of faffing around with useless hotlines, the government should be asserting its authority by getting tough on the NZTA. After all, the traffic management racket wouldn’t – couldn’t – exist without the NZTA’s endorsement and approval.
What we’ve got here is a cosy, symbiotic relationship between the NZTA, roading contractors and traffic management companies. Over the past 10 years or so the latter have proliferated like … well, like road cones. This unholy three-way alliance is holding the country hostage and playing us all for suckers.
And what’s the government’s solution? A bloody hotline. Good grief.
I don’t mind admitting this has become personal for me. I do a lot of driving. Over the past three years I’ve covered every region and every provincial city in the country with the exception of Invercargill (the closest I got was Gore). And every time I set out on a road trip I brace myself for the delays and disruptions that I know are inevitable.
We go along with this costly and unnecessary pantomime because we’re passive, compliant people. That was shown during the Covid pandemic, when we meekly fell into line with authoritarian controls that, in retrospect, are now acknowledged as oppressively over the top (and yes, I admit I was one of the fall-into-liners).
Traffic management depends on that same deference to authority. The NZTA and its traffic management bullies wield the power and we have little choice but to do as they instruct. I mean, what are your options when you’re forced to make a wholly unnecessary one-hour detour (as I did not long ago) or crawl at 30kmh through road works that have been in progress for months and even years and where nothing is happening? You can only fume impotently.
Sure, you could abuse the traffic management people standing around in their hi-vis vests (standing or sitting around being quite literally what they do most of the time, usually staring at their smartphones). But what would that achieve? They’re certainly a big part of the problem, but they didn’t cause it. The fault lies with the NZTA bureaucrats, who are safely insulated from public wrath; and beyond them, with the politicians who allowed the grotesque traffic management racket to flourish in the first place and only now are waking up to the great bloated nuisance it has become.
Oh, but I forget; the politicians have taken bold and decisive action: they’ve set up a hot line to report excessive use of road cones. Problem solved, then.
Looking for some facts to substantiate my jaundiced view of the hi-vis highwaymen, I recently asked the NZTA to provide me with figures showing the proportion of the national roading budget devoted to traffic management. I had seen speculative estimates ranging as high as 40 percent, which struck even me as unlikely.
Extraordinarily, it turns out that the NZTA has not historically separated out traffic management costs from its overall expenditure. This in itself suggests slack budgetary management and a remarkable lack of concern about how public funds are spent.
I would have thought that the cost of traffic management was the type of significant information NZTA board members would expect to have at their fingertips. That they apparently didn’t think to routinely request it every year doesn’t inspire confidence in their competence.
The NZTA told me, however, that it had recently undertaken a project – as if the thought had only just occurred to it – that sampled its contracts, and from this it was able to calculate average TTM (temporary traffic management) costs. These indicated that TTM over the past three years accounted for between 9 and 9.5 percent of total spending on road maintenance, operations and capital contracts.
At first glance, that may not sound outrageous. But when you look at it in dollar terms, a different impression takes shape.
In the years 2021-24, NZTA spent $786 million on traffic management. $786 million! That was out of total state highway costs of $8.4 billion. In 2023-24, the cost of TTM was put at $317 million (assuming the NZTA got its calculations right).
It goes without saying that $786 million buys a helluva lot of road cones, high-vis vests and expensive trucks and utes and with their ostentatious flashing lights. This may explain why so many of the trucks and utes appear to be new.
It’s also clear from the NZTA response to my inquiry that there’s no systematic collection of reliable information relating to the cost of traffic management. That’s how I interpret the NZTA’s statement that “We have collected TTM actual and physical works costs from suppliers for a sample of contracts where costs were recorded and accurate, and we have calculated TTM costs percentages accordingly.”
Here’s an obvious question: if the NZTA doesn’t have complete and accurate records showing what TTM is costing, as that statement suggests, how can it know whether it’s getting its money’s worth?
You might think that a switched-on board of directors would want to know whether the money was effectively spent. Has any work been done on costs versus benefits? Does the NZTA have any idea how many lives have been saved or serious injuries avoided by its road-cone control freakery?
If any research has been done, let’s see it. If it hasn’t been done, why not?
Has anyone bothered to weigh the supposed safety benefits of the traffic management racket against the incalculable delay, frustration and inconvenience caused to road users? And I don’t just mean hapless private motorists like me.
Infuriating though it is to have my travel constantly disrupted, the far more serious impact is on commercial traffic. God alone knows the cumulative economic cost of holdups in the supply chain caused by trucks and tankers sitting idle for long periods at temporary red lights, forced to make detours or made to drive at ridiculous speeds through long sections of road works where nothing is happening.
The counter argument, of course, is that roads are part of our essential infrastructure and must be kept in good condition. That requires maintenance work. People understand that and will accept a reasonable amount of inconvenience. But it bears repeating over and over again that the contagion of traffic management New Zealand-style is a new phenomenon.
For decades our highways were built and maintained, often in very challenging places, without the need for heavy-handed traffic management, forests of road cones and lots of bullying trucks with flashing lights. We did it then. What makes it impossible now?
It goes without saying that $786 million buys a helluva lot of road cones, high-vis vests and expensive trucks and utes and with their ostentatious flashing lights. This may explain why so many of the trucks and utes appear to be new.
It’s also clear from the NZTA response to my inquiry that there’s no systematic collection of reliable information relating to the cost of traffic management. That’s how I interpret the NZTA’s statement that “We have collected TTM actual and physical works costs from suppliers for a sample of contracts where costs were recorded and accurate, and we have calculated TTM costs percentages accordingly.”
Here’s an obvious question: if the NZTA doesn’t have complete and accurate records showing what TTM is costing, as that statement suggests, how can it know whether it’s getting its money’s worth?
You might think that a switched-on board of directors would want to know whether the money was effectively spent. Has any work been done on costs versus benefits? Does the NZTA have any idea how many lives have been saved or serious injuries avoided by its road-cone control freakery?
If any research has been done, let’s see it. If it hasn’t been done, why not?
Has anyone bothered to weigh the supposed safety benefits of the traffic management racket against the incalculable delay, frustration and inconvenience caused to road users? And I don’t just mean hapless private motorists like me.
Infuriating though it is to have my travel constantly disrupted, the far more serious impact is on commercial traffic. God alone knows the cumulative economic cost of holdups in the supply chain caused by trucks and tankers sitting idle for long periods at temporary red lights, forced to make detours or made to drive at ridiculous speeds through long sections of road works where nothing is happening.
The counter argument, of course, is that roads are part of our essential infrastructure and must be kept in good condition. That requires maintenance work. People understand that and will accept a reasonable amount of inconvenience. But it bears repeating over and over again that the contagion of traffic management New Zealand-style is a new phenomenon.
For decades our highways were built and maintained, often in very challenging places, without the need for heavy-handed traffic management, forests of road cones and lots of bullying trucks with flashing lights. We did it then. What makes it impossible now?
Part Two to come ...
Karl du Fresne, a freelance journalist, is the former editor of The Dominion newspaper. This article was republished from his blog which can be found at karldufresne.blogspot.co.nz.
12 comments:
How many roadworkers have been killed? I beleive 2 !
I think the current level of cones was put in place after a couple of Higgins workers picking up roadside rubbish were wiped out, there not being enough cones and the like it was said. Big fines were paid and the smart money bought up traffic management equipment and went to work to keep us safer.
Ask Canada how they manage cones - I drove across Canada on all sorts of roads last year, and counted the cones on the thumbs of one hand
Better that they are told to remove the whole lot in fell swoop, then they can start again under new rules... if they want citizen help, give us tae word, we will round them up and dump them somewhere.
What is the offical purpose of road cones?!?
If it’s to signal “work ahead” their outta control over use totally destroys this purpose. Because over half the time there is no “work” ahead just endless cones
Maybe work will commence in a week or two once all the cones are deployed… hard to know 🤔
How many flash boats and yachts down in the marina, or expensive Remuera mansions have been purchased with the massive profits from renting out cones at $10 each per day ?
Any decent engineer will see this for what it is, a classic "shifting the burden construct": In the “shifting the burden” archetype, decision-makers fail to identify the fundamental solution early and are subjected to accumulated side effects as they resort to quick remedial solutions. In this case, we know the problem, shifting the burden onto the general public to dob in excessive cone-ism is complete bollocks. We have far too many examples where our bureaucracy has and is continually failing to deal with the root cause of our problems and instead resorting to a patch and mend approach. We see it with legislation such as the TP Bill, if they simply rip out the notion of principles in the '75 Act and all others the problem will largely go away, instead we are doomed to keep making the same errors over and over again until we disappear up our own fundamentals (figuratively speaking!).
My contention is that a fundamental low level of attention by drivers is the problem. Modern roads and vehicles require very little attention, effort, input or skill to keep on the road; the drivers are deep within the soundproof bodywork disconnected behind vast A pillars. Most minor controls are multi movement, not immediately self evident, unlabelled and/or unreadable at a glance. There are complex ventilation, air conditioning, and entertainment controls spread over a console far from the sight line and unable to be read at a glance. There are now vast screen displays, ditto. All vehicles have a radio part occupying attention. And the phones and nav systems. It is well established that merely talking on a phone is nearly as diversionary as a hand held one. Drivers do not fear even quite major crashes as they are well protected and near all cars insured. Attention to the road is very moderate. Thousands of cars are hounded off the roads every year for insignificant rust, far less than tolerated in UK. But that is in the Trade interest. Rules on clarity and simplicity of in car controls are not sought as such would interfere with unrestricted sales. If inattentive motorists contributing to crashes at works were prosecuted and it publicised much of the cone clutter could be avoided. But Police are too busy, and with so few now receiving newspapers, and such poor coverage, few would ever learn about. I have extensively driven cars of considerable age in modern times. I analyse my driving very critically. The incidents of potential conflict have proven far greater when in moderns for the reasons above. The number of vivid items at roadworks, including cone shepherds and clipboard wielders, is often very diverting. The most important, the STOP/GO placard is about the least obvious.
Maybe a 44 gallon drum with a flashing red light on top and at each end of roadworks might do the trick.
As a bonus you could flog a light at night and put it in your flat.
All in the name of elf and safety, or maybe, 'follow the money'.
To Anon @ 10:19 April 6 - sadly we have to " advise that your comment" is likely to cause any/all University Students, predominately 1st Year, to take said comment to heart and implement said action after a night out at the Local "Watering Hole" [advertising of any Pub/Hotel/Club or for/about any alcoholic drink is prohibited on this Website - thus a generalization is used] - thus said action is then likely to add to the cost of any road safety management activity already in place, by the required purchase of replacement - road cones, flashing lights, road signs, barriers - to ensure that ongoing road safety is maintained, till the next round of theft, appropriation etc.
And yes good people of NZ it has already happened, perpetrated by the very University Students, returning home from the Pub.
Signs with Street Names or Rural Roads are the other object of " appropriation ".
Remember when the reduction in speed at road works was 30 miles per hour, when the country changed to metrics the lazy buggers simply kept the "30" signals instead of supplying new signs showing 50kph which in reality is the speed we have had at road works for years and without cones.
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