Ryan Bridge: NZTA - the Grinch that stole Christmas

A few years ago, we had a bunch of stories about Santa parades getting cancelled because of red tape and traffic management.

NZTA was the Grinch that stole Christmas.

Dr Eric Crampton: Be careful what you wish for – new cost-benefit analysis paves paradise

Sometimes, policy work is like wishing on a cursed wish-granting monkey’s paw. Like the one in the old Alfred Hitchcock Hour episode, later parodied in The Simpsons. Wish on the paw, one of the paw’s extended fingers will curl, and your wish will come true.

But not in the way you’d wanted. You may even wish that you’d never wished at all.

Ryan Bridge: cone overkill must stop

Chris Bishop says we're sick of over-the-top cone use and expensive traffic management plans.

And he'd be right. They are so annoying and often, to the untrained eye at least, completely pointless.

They take a $100 job and make it a $1000 job.

So why is this till happening?

Karl du Fresne: My war with the NZTA: Part Deux

Here’s a piece of advice for anyone contemplating a road trip: carefully check the NZTA website beforehand for any road closures. 

This never used to be an essential precaution. It is now. And again the question must be asked: what has changed that requires state highways to be so frequently closed, causing huge inconvenience and disruption, when it wasn’t necessary in the past? 

Karl du Fresne: My war with the NZTA: Part One

So let me see if I’ve got this straight: the government’s response to public fury and exasperation at the wasteful, disruptive and mostly useless traffic management racket is to set up a hotline where people can report excessive road cone use? God save us. 

I predict this pathetically feeble non-solution, announced this week, will achieve one-fifth of SFA because hardly anyone will bother ringing an 0800 number to dob the traffic management racketeers in. 

John MacDonald: Who should set the speed limit on your street?

Even though the air temperature was down around the minus-4 mark in Canterbury this morning, there would have been no shortage of muppets driving as if it’s the middle of summer.

You know, the speed limit’s 50kph or 80kph or 100kph and that’s the speed I’m going to go.

Heather du Plessis-Allan: It's D-day for the Te Huia train service

Well, it’s D-day for Te Huia.

Today's the day that NZTA has met and has decided whether or not to keep funding the train past the end of June. Unless NZTA gives them more money, it’s all over by the first of July.

And come on, it’s gotta be all over right? Because the case for this thing has never actually stacked up.

Barrie Saunders: NZTA does not know how much it spends on cones

Astonishing as it may seem NZTA does not know either how much it spends on road cones as part of its Temporary Traffic Management system, or even how many companies it uses to supply and manage the cones. See my Official Information Act request and the response below.

Karl du Fresne: Traffic cones and the precautionary principle

Driving between Eketahuna and Masterton recently, I came across some road works.
The road was reduced to one lane each way. There were the usual Stop/Go controls at either end, but this time there was a new twist.

I was at the head of a queue that was stopped at one end. A line of vehicles coming the other way was led through by a white ute with flashing lights.

As they reached my end of the road works, the ute pulled over to the verge. Then it did a U-turn and positioned itself at the head of the line of traffic waiting to go the other way.

Oliver Hartwich: Even mediocre would be easier to bear - How nz lost its mojo

“We have lost clarity of how we add value, why we are here, what we exist for.”

That was among the findings in an internal review prepared by the New Zealand Transport Authority (NZTA), obtained by Radio New Zealand (RNZ).

But that statement could equally apply to New Zealand as a whole. The country has lost its mojo after a decade of feeling good about itself.

For many years, pollsters Roy Morgan and Curia have been asking New Zealanders whether the country is heading in the right direction. Apart from a few months around the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, large majorities of Kiwis have always responded “Yes”.

During the first Covid lockdown, in April 2020, the highest positive value was 77 per cent for ‘right direction’. This figure has now dropped to 36 per cent, while 50 per cent of New Zealanders believe their country is going in the wrong direction.

That is quite a mood swing, and there are reasons for it.