Brown said contractors and councils would also be expected to cut traffic management costs.<\/p>\n
The Transport Agency will have to start counting up what it spends on an “infestation” of road cones and temporary traffic management from September.<\/p>\n
Transport Minister Simeon Brown told a Budget scrutiny select committee on Thursday afternoon it was “unacceptable” that NZTA did not know these costs.<\/p>\n
It was “one of the reasons why we’ve been in a situation where traffic management expenditure has become, in many cases, the number one cost of doing business on our roads”, in the way it impacted on the wide range of uses of roads.<\/p>\n
On top of making the agency start to measure them, a new less prescriptive code was coming in that should be more efficient, he told MPs.<\/p>\n
“I’ve received advice that in some cases where traffic management’s been proscribed, it’s actually more dangerous putting out the road cones than it is actually doing the work,” Brown said.<\/p>\n
“So we actually just have to take a safety at a reasonable cost approach, rather than a safety at any cost approach.”<\/p>\n
The new code that was more like Australia’s risk-based one “will make a significant difference”.<\/p>\n
He added a recent Waka Kotahi study found that, at many sites lots of road cones were being left out unnecessarily, frustrating motorists.<\/p>\n
“There’s been an infestation.”<\/p>\n
The agency would be much more rigorous about cones, Brown said.<\/p>\n
Waka Kotahi has said that traffic management costs\u00a0were included in tenders for an overall job<\/a>, and not able to be separated out. They varied a lot but tended to account from between three and 10 percent of the capital cost of a project, it said.<\/p>\n Brown said contractors and councils would also be expected to cut traffic management costs.<\/p>\n