More road cones, but also more rules at roadworks: John Williamson

Road workers have become a common sight as projects are quickly ushered through before the weather turns. Photo / NZME

OPINION

It’s roadworks time again. Over the winter months we have pounded our wet and sodden roads, developing potholes, slips and slumps and causing outrage and outages; the Brynderwyns will be closed for the next couple of months and contractors have spent the past few weeks making sure the alternate routes are up to the extra traffic.

Now those contractors descend on our local roads and state highways in a rush to get them up to speed before the next rains come. We will have road cones, stop/go people and road workers at many road sites throughout the North. So, the golden rule for any road trip in the next few months is plan for roadworks, expect to be held up, be patient and those road workers are people too, who expect to get home safely at the end of the day.

Those are the realities, but the reality also is that the extent of the temporary traffic management causes frustrations, most particularly when it appears there is nothing going on and you see workers on cellphones, resting or dozing beside the road.

There are two lots of contractors here. The roading contractors doing the works and the traffic management contractors controlling the movement and safety of people, cyclists and drivers through and around the site. The traffic management people control the site before and after the roading contractors enter and leave the site.

The reality also is that the whole temporary traffic management system adds significantly to the cost of the roading job. A recent Business Desk commentary suggested the average weighted cost of maintenance and renewal of roads included a 15-20 per cent component as temporary traffic management.

My own experience four years ago is of installing a water meter in the footpath next to a state highway. It was $2000 to do the two-hour job and $3000 for the traffic management. Things have got more expensive since then, with $4255-a-day traffic management cost.

Some would say we now have more road cones, but the rules, too, have evolved. Over the past 12 months, the NZ Transport Agency guidance for temporary traffic management has moved from a very prescriptive, one-size-fits-all approach to a more site-specific, risk-based approach with temporary traffic management designed to mitigate such risks.

We have our own project next to State Highway 14 in play at the moment, and I have been dreading the cost of traffic management to complete the job.

We live next to the state highway and access the highway via a vehicle crossing. We have a plan to subdivide a small block with access from a private road also on our property. The resource consent has NZTA requiring us to upgrade our state highway vehicle crossing as a condition of consent. You could be forgiven for concluding an element of coercion there. I am okay with the notion of upgrading the entrance, but what of the traffic management cost to do so.

The first quote based on the prescribed approach indicated a $42k job with 55 per cent of that as temporary traffic management. This included three days of stop/go presence by a traffic management contractor.

My view was, I have for many years mowed the berm on a ride-on for 250m along the state highway. There is a wide shoulder and I have never felt unsafe from passing traffic. The plan included closing the shoulder for the term of the project at a fixed price and I reckoned that should be enough.

We had a discussion. The issue was access to the site by concrete trucks and machinery from the state highway. If they could access the site from the private road there would be no need for the works to be carried out in the carriageway at all. Works could be done within the shoulder, which would be closed with all machinery access through our property. A $42k job becomes a $27k job, which is much more palatable.

The thing is, there is no question about making sure people who work alongside the road are able to do so in a safe environment. The one-size-fits-all prescribed approach is not appropriate. Each project should be assessed against the risks associated with it and a plan developed to accommodate that.