Help for stressed courier drivers

By JASON COLLIE

Courier companies are offering counselling for their stressed-out drivers as frustrations mount in Auckland traffic jams.

Businesses are "boiling over" with frustration as the traffic jams cost them - and you - up to $1 billion a year.

Every holdup and traffic accident that clogs the roads is felt in the pocket by the business community as truckies, couriers and sales representatives are stranded alongside thousands of other motorists.

The delays, catch-up costs and lost business opportunities now eclipse the $1 billion-a-year mark - up from the $750 million estimated in 1997 by accountants Ernst & Young - according to the pressure group Auckland Business Forum.

And much of that cost is being passed on to the consumer.

Some courier firms are offering their drivers one-on-one counselling to keep their frustration levels in check as they sit in queues all day.

Urgent Couriers managing director Steve Bonnici said his firm had run courses for frustrated owner-drivers who were losing thousands of dollars in traffic jams.

SUB60 general manager David Tombs estimated a handful of his 120 drivers needed counselling a year.

Alasdair Thompson, the Northern Employers and Manufacturers Association chief executive, said Auckland businesses reached exasperation point just over a year ago and congestion was now their number one concern.

"Concerns have been building for the last five years," he said. "But about 15 months ago there was a strong boilover of feeling communicated to us.

"There are an awful lot of businesses, and not just big businesses, with a deep concern about commercial viability being detrimentally affected by gridlock.

"It's costing all sorts of people in all sorts of ways."

The Business Forum, which includes the Auckland Chamber of Commerce, Ports of Auckland and the Northern Regional Road Transport Association among its members, is pushing for completion of the motorway network by 2010 as a priority over public transport.

While commuters fume, many businesses are trying to think their way around the rush-hour logjams.

Many are opening their warehouses and outlets earlier and keeping them open later to dodge rush-hour traffic.

Les Paterson, chairman of the regional land transport committee, preferred to rely on the Ernst & Young study figure rather than the Business Forum's $1 billion estimate. "It's the only figure that has any credibility, but in all honesty we will never remove that [the cost] entirely," he said.

"We must be trying to move all parts of the transport network as fast as we possibly can.

"We have moved from the planning mode to the implementation mode. There is a feeling that transport is the issue and it's what we have got to get under control."

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