IMAGE - Transport Blog

Have you noticed the condition of our roads lately? When you’re on holiday, you may be more focused on where you’re heading rather than the road surface you’re driving on. Perhaps you're driving aggressively around trucks and looking at their body rather than the road surface.

In one of the most sparsely populated areas in the country, our roads are falling apart fast. Most of the damage to our roads is caused by one of two things. Firstly there’s the weight of the traffic. Presently we have more trucks driving on our roads than we have had for many years. There’s forestry road erosion and the occasional 190 tonne vehicle, combined with not much rail or other means of transport for goods. Trucking logistics is integral to our economy, but trucks cause more damage to our roads than any other item travelling on them. Trucking is not the only way to distribute goods and services, and certainly trucking levies and taxes don’t cover all the costs of road maintenance.

The biggest contributing factor to the damage on our roads is actually funding. Northland Regional Council transport committee chairman John Bain told the Advocate last year that Northland received more than its share of NZTA funding considering its population, but probably a great deal less considering the amount of roading in the region. Our roads are typically constructed during the winter months and on very unpredictable soils (common known as Onerahi Chaos soil). The money is not being spent properly.

With the combined actions of heavy trucks driving over our water-logged roads, the roads act like a sponge and when compressed they soak up the water. When released, the top seal is stripped away which then allows more water to get into the road and more damage is then created. It gets extremely rainy up here in the subtropics, remember.

The only benefactor when our roads are wrecked is the construction industry. This factor coincides with the government encouraging the rail lines to be removed and encouraging heavier trucks to be used on the roads. With road maintenance pointing towards a billion dollars in costs each year in this region alone, it’s worth reconsidering the expense.

So what can we do about this? As this is coming up to an election year we need to encourage our politicians to get more money for our Northland roads, and we need to ease up on the excessive use of heavy trucks on our roads.

Lastly, everybody – please remember to stop driving aggressively around trucks.