Road freight transport is embedded in the economy. Nobody can function without it. Trucks deliver the food and clothing and everything else we buy at a supermarket or shopping mall.
Some of it will have arrived in Auckland on a ship or by rail, but to get to its final destination it needs a truck.
The most recent statistics gathered by National Road Carriers show that every week a medium-to-large-sized supermarket receives 100 pallets of toilet paper, 100 pallets of nappies, 100 pallets of drinks and hundreds of other pallets of fast moving consumer goods - all delivered by truck.
The Auckland metropolitan area sees over one million litres of milk a day on the move - by truck.
With the current building and civil engineering infrastructure boom 75,000 tonnes of aggregates are being transported around the city every day - by truck.
All these businesses operate by the just-in-time business model. Goods are delivered daily, because they don't have the huge warehouse space to store everything if deliveries were only made once a week.
On an annual basis, there are 182 million tonnes of freight on Auckland's roads, 1.3 million containers moving between the port and the inland Metroport at Te Papa and out of the region.
The boom in the motor industry has result in 225,000 vehicles a year being trucked away from the wharves and delivered all around the North Island.
Yes, the opening of the twin tunnels joining State Highway 20 to State Highway 16 has helped, as will the widening of the existing motorways.
The Sylvia Park to Onehunga east-west link will take several thousand trucks a day off the urban streets of Onehunga, Te Papa and Penrose and deliver them direct to the inland Metroport.
The Penlink project to the Whangaparaoa Peninsula will take pressure off Silverdale. But these projects are in the future.
National Road Carriers would like to see Auckland Transport freeing up existing roads and giving more priority to working vehicles.
Trucks moving about the city are less productive than they were five or 10 years ago. Sometimes by up to 50 per cent if a truck can only complete two round trips a day instead of three.
That results in higher transport costs being added to the final cost of any item you or anybody else might buy.
Getting trucks moving more freely means keeping costs under control for everybody, whether you are buying toothpaste or timber; cauliflower or concrete.
Freeing up existing roads means getting more single occupant cars off the roads. Auckland Transport needs to make greater efforts to encourage the use of public transport with better park-and-ride facilities for both bus and rail users and allow more priority vehicles into bus lanes or create lanes to be shared by trucks and buses. The Northern Busway alongside the northern motorway, is the most under-utilised piece of road in Auckland, even during rush hour.
Creating extra lanes of traffic on existing roads is not difficult. All the major arterial roads should have no parking 24/7. Get rid of the parked cars - just one parked vehicle can make a lane unusable and create a bottleneck - and you create another lane for traffic to flow along.
Clearways should also ban parking 24/7.
With our expanding population, there are going to be more vehicles of all types on the road, whether we like it or not, even if the upward trend of the increased use of public transport continues.
Those extra vehicles have to go somewhere. Let's create the extra space on our existing roads to accommodate them while keeping the traffic moving better than it is now.
And that will get all the business vehicles, trucks and vans, going about their business in a more economical way, to everybody's benefit.
