Orange road cones make many motorists see red: Neil Volzke
Neil Volzke is mayor of Stratford district
OPINION
Most people have a pet hate in their lives, and it differs widely for each person. What one person accepts and tolerates, in contrast, can drive others into a rage.
If there is one exception to that thinking and something that binds us together as one, it would be our common dislike of the humble road cone. These orange blots on our landscape seem to be everyone’s pet hate and there are thousands of them scattered everywhere, just to ensure the annoyance they create is suffered equally by all.
One thing that bemuses me, though, is that given Kiwis’ general dislike for road cones, why so many thousands of them are stolen each year and why every second student flat in the country has a cone adorning the living room. Doesn’t matter, I guess.
More importantly, there are some winners that benefit from the proliferation of the use of road cones. Cone manufacturers must be laughing all the way to the bank, and the temporary traffic management companies that use the cones would not be far behind them. But the cost to councils and Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) for temporary traffic management (TTM), which includes deploying thousands of cones, is no laughing matter; it is huge.
There are many reported projects where the cost of TTM is so disproportionate to the cost of the actual road work being done, it seems almost uneconomic to do the work. It is simply a ridiculous cost. Keeping workers safe and controlling traffic flow is always the priority, but the approach of saturating an area with cones, often made worse by leaving them there well after the job is completed, is the ultimate way to upset the average road user.
The Government’s recent announcement of the rollout of a new risk-based approach to temporary traffic management that will reduce the number and cost of road cones on New Zealand roads, while maintaining the safety of workers and road users, will be music to the ears of most people. Transport Minister Simeon Brown has said the TTM approach is “out of control” and, like many others, I agree.
Minister Brown said, “The rollout of NZTA’s new risk-based TTM guidance for state highway worksites was based on the Australian approach, where there is far less reliance on the orange road cone”.
“Excessive use of road cones and temporary speed limit reductions — sometimes left in place when work is complete — simply increases cost, forces people to slow down, and frustrates drivers. In fact, the NZ Transport Agency conducted a review of TTM at 800 maintenance worksites on the state highway network across the country in February and found that 145 of these sites were not needed, showing how out of control the use of road cones and temporary traffic management has become.”
Unfortunately, at present there is no data being collated on how much is being spent on TTM, so no official figure can be used to highlight the costs. Having said that, everyone involved in the roading game knows it is staggeringly high.
As part of the change, the Government will be requiring NZTA and all road controlling authorities (that’s councils) to report quarterly on the amount of money they are spending, so everyone knows how much of your money is being spent on TTM. The first of these reports will be produced in October and will determine a baseline of how much NZTA has spent on TTM in the past three years.
There is a clear expectation that expenditure on road cones and TTM will reduce each year and, frankly, it is about time.
At last, some common sense is prevailing, and over coming months motorists’ frustration levels may be given a reprieve. That is something we can all look forward to and I hope the savings made from TTM can be redirected into the actual roadworks that, overall, will result in a better bang for our buck.