John Williamson: A summer of Northland roadworks calls for greater road safety

Many roadworks are planned for Northland this summer. Photo / Michael Cunningham

OPINION

It’s been curious to hear the opinion of some local body politicians about road safety in the last little while. At the most recent Regional Council Transport Committee meeting, one elected member was so intent on expressing his view about the relative lack of value regarding road safety spend that the standing officials did not have time to formulate a response.

The tirade demanded an answer, but an intelligent conversation with factual data is a more appropriate outcome than a hurried response in a public meeting.

The other comment was in a less public place, with a prominent local leader saying: “It’s time to draw the line under the road toll. Thirty years ago we were killing 700 people - now we are down to 300, and that’s okay. It’s time to reduce the road safety spend and get back to fixing the roads.”

To be fair, both public figures were expressing frustration at the state of our roads, the sort of money that will be required to fix them, and the really challenging task of re-allocating projects while minimising rates increases - but don’t make road safety the scapegoat.

The reality of our roads in the next six months is that they are going to have orange cones and roadworks everywhere. That’s as contractors set about repairing the damage from multiple weather events and try to catch up with years of deferred maintenance that have made our roads so newsworthy.

There are a number of important issues emerging about the relative value of road safety. The first is that the gangs of workers populating our roads in the next six months are in their workplace. They are there to make our roads and driving safer, and deserve our respect.

Nobody goes to work to be spat at, sworn at, driven at or threatened. There will be hundreds of these workplaces in Northland this summer, and the people working there deserve to feel safe so that they can go home to their families at the end of the day knowing they have made our roads better.

The second issue though, is about the extent and relative value of the traffic management plans around these roadworks. Over the past few years, the extent and activity of these work sites have grown significantly.

The trigger was the 2019 tragedy of three road workers’ deaths in the Bay of Plenty after they were slammed into the culvert they were working on by a runaway truck. The victims’ employer, Higgins Contractors, was fined $270,000 plus $495,000 in reparation, because of a lack of temporary traffic management around their workplace.

The Code of Temporary Traffic Management is a compliance-based approach to all works on public roads. It specifies what must happen and leaves little ability to apply a risk-based assessment to each roading situation. Its application has shifted the dollar value of roading expenditure.

A recent review of Far North District Council’s maintenance contracts indicates traffic management plans had increased from $300,000 to $3 million over a 12-month period. You could say that is $2.7m which has not gone to potholes, road grading, culvert clearing or reseals, but has gone to traffic management contractors. Multiply that by around 70 road controlling authorities, then you could have a reason for the deterioration of many roads.

A one-size-fits-all approach to traffic management is no longer appropriate, and it is good to see the emergence of an industry-led Road Worker Safety Governance Group, which will explore and implement a more pragmatic risk-based approach to the safety of workers on our roads.

But that is at the practical end of roading expenditure and safety. What is also interesting is that over the last few months, Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency has introduced a new assessment of the “Value of a Statistical Life” and “The Monetary Value Placed on Saving Time while Driving.”

The statistical life value has increased from $4.85m to $12.5m and the value of time saved on the road has increased from $7.8 per hour to $19.53 per hour. These seem like esoteric numbers which are used in the cost-benefit analysis of roading projects. But with the subtle shift in the value of time saved against lives saved, we should see an increased emphasis on road safety improvements. Road safety, therefore, is here to stay.