Chris Hyde: What if climate change is causing the potholes on our roads?

OPINION:
The world is heating up, and there's a pothole in my street to prove it.

Over the past few months, I've slowly come to the conclusion these menaces of the road are not just a pain, they're actually a symbol of New Zealand society as we know it breaking down due to temperature increases.

When climate change first started to dominate scientific and mainstream media roughly 20 years ago, it was sold to us with doomsday weather imagery.

There were videos of icebergs breaking off the Antarctic ice shelf. These were extremely worrying, but not an obvious problem for the average Hastings commuter.

There were, and still are, regular photos of the angry rising sea imploding the backyards of baches on Hawke's Bay's Cape Coast.

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Again, a heck of a head-scratcher of a problem and hugely symbolic of the threat of sea level rise, but unless you actually own one of those homes you're not really affected by it.

The photos of extreme droughts, heatwaves, tornadoes, floods, lightning - of course we're all affected by weather becoming more extreme, but there's always someone ready to quip that the forecast was terrible back in 1965 too.

The reality is that climate change upends everything - it means food price increases, ideological clashes, even future wars over resources, and yes, it means potholes.

The ones that sprung up all over Aotearoa after the wettest winter on record, were climate change in action.

With more heat invariably comes more moisture - it's what experts have been telling us for decades. Sure enough, this was as close to a tropical winter as we've ever had.

But potholes aren't just caused by a wet climate, they're also caused by poor road quality and a lack of regular maintenance.

And that's going to continue.

In a warming world, there is, quite simply, less incentive to invest in roads.

Alternative modes of transport - trains, biking, walking - need the investment more because that's what will get our emissions down and save future generations from having to roam the Central Hawke's Bay desert looking for rodents to feast on.

State Highway 5's speed seems doomed to never return to 100km/h.

It's 2022 and killing one another in head-on crashes for the sake of a few extra minutes is starting to be frowned upon, but also, just quietly, Waka Kotahi won't ever have the funding now to turn it into Hawke's Bay's version of Transmission Gully.

SH2 from Norsewood to Wairoa (excluding the expressway) and SH50 are the next two to face the glare of Waka Kotahi's speed review spotlight.

I predict decent stretches of those, too, will go to 80km/h, especially on the stretch between Napier and Wairoa.

It's patently unfair for this region, especially when Waikato gets a 110km/h highway.

But there's only so much money that we can keep throwing at making car journeys fast and comfortable, when those journeys are slowly but surely making all of our lives so much worse.