A dose of common sense is urgently needed to pull back on excessive temporary traffic management with its proliferation of cones that is adding millions to Councils’ construction costs and adding to rate hikes.
I shared with Transport Minister Simeon Brown when he was in Nelson on Monday the example of the new 4.5km of cycleway at Ngātīmoti that we opened at the weekend. It cost $188,000 for traffic management, making up 25% of the total spend. This cost, when replicated over hundreds of projects to fix and replace water pipes, upgrade and reseal roads and roundabouts and build and maintain footpaths and cycleways, amounts to many millions a year for our Council.
I get that ratepayers are frustrated at high rate increases. The difficult job is digging into the detail to find efficiencies over a large organisation undertaking hundreds of projects. I do not want us pulling back on our programme of infrastructure upgrades but to find economies. The current cost to Council of traffic management is not accounted for separately. I have asked our infrastructure staff to identify this cost starting this year, report on it six monthly and to identify savings.
The cost of this excessive traffic management is not just to the ratepayer and taxpayer. It costs road users when traffic is unnecessarily delayed and can adversely affect adjacent businesses.
The root cause of this problem was the previous Government’s zero risk policy regardless of cost. The “Road to Zero” made for a great political slogan but is not practical. We will never make the road safe for the complete idiot. Nothing in life is completely risk free.
I welcome Minister Brown’s change in approach. We need “safety at reasonable cost” rather than “zero risk”. This is more in line with comparable countries such as Australia, the UK and USA. It’s rational rather than emotional. We all want safe roads but we also want affordable rates.
Temporary traffic management with lower speeds, signs and cones is always going to be required. We just need to pull it back and for road users and road workers to use more common sense.
