By Margaret Evans (former Mayor and Hamilton Ratepayer)

I’ve suggested to Hamilton City Councillors that orange road cones should be a target for savings in their overwhelmed 2024 Long-Term Plan (LTP) budget. For a start, they should review their current $540 million contract with Downer for city ‘street keeping’, taking into account public questions about performance quality along with the government’s new land transport policy poke.

‘Streets’ are now in the sights of Minister Simeon Brown who is insisting on better value for money spent, and better outcomes. As well as Transport, he is also Minister for Local Government.

Road cones are such a popular public topic, I’m surprised neither newshounds nor local bodies have picked up Brown’s new orders to ‘reduce spending on temporary traffic management’ since that is the clue. Brown’s March 2024 Land Transport Policy Statement for national Transport Agency/Waka Kotahi also insists on increased maintenance and fewer potholes, along with ‘maintaining the safety of workers and road users’.

Here’s an extract (from page 22 of the Draft Government Policy Statement on land transport 2024/25–2033/34)

Outcomes the Government expects will be achieved…

-reduced journey times and increased travel time reliability

-less congestion and increased patronage on public transport

-improved access to markets, employment and areas that contribute to economic growth

-more efficient supply chains for freight

-Unlocked access to greenfield land for housing development and supporting greater intensification Increased maintenance and resilience

-more kilometres of the road network resealed and rehabilitated each year

-fewer potholes

-a more resilient network. Improved safety

-reduction in deaths and serious injuries

-increased enforcement.

-better use of existing capacity

-less expenditure on temporary traffic management.

The current nationwide epidemic of orange road cones presents an opportunity for cutting Red Tape, bureaucracy and bureaucrats, and public costs. Outcomes would include a boost in popularity ratings for courageous political leaders, a reduction in road rage, and enhanced community wellbeing.  Savings could add up to as much as a billion or so public dollars annually – based on Auckland mayor Wayne Brown’s $145m last year, and Hamilton’s $700,000 bus stop moving proposal which included $130,000 for Temporary Traffic Management (TTM).

This is also a first step towards another target; to end long-winded prescriptive public policies that lack robust evidence, and excessive council agendas inhibiting scrutiny of high cost-low value projects and programmes.

The orange cone infestation is a widely recognised example of this culture, amplified by the little publicised 2022 revision of TTM plans ‘to make our roads safer’. That review is itself worthy of a deep dig, a forensic-style investigation to illustrate the growth in nonsense decision-making processes and the ‘easy money’ for those latched on to these public teats.

Some howls of outrage may result, and redundancies – particularly in staff and consultants in local bodies everywhere, and at Transport NZ, WorkSafe, MBIE and Internal Affairs, in advisory, policy, secretariat, and managerial roles (that last where the buck should have stopped). There is plenty of work for the pot-hole fillers, leaf sweepers, and garden weeders to be kept employed and probably on better pay if contracts are de-merged away from the corporate conglomerates (and that’s another subject).

And so, back to the orange cones issue:

Everybody it seems has a story about orange cones, disrupting our travel, and digging into the public purse for street repairs and construction. A common version describes extensive lines of orange cones but not a high-viz vest clad worker in sight along the Waikato Expressway.

Then there is the ‘team of several trucks, a dozen or more high-viz vest wearers plus some with stop/go lollipops who arrive to unload their cargo of orange cones and finally spray paint a white ring around a pothole before driving off….’  For my tiny cul-de-sac it was five weeks to replace a cell-phone mast and monitor around 50 cones. The folk-jokes usually centre on the wish for shares in the Orange Cone Company.

Whether its public or private sector, we the people end up paying.  And strangely, although there’s a widely expressed community view that consultants and contractors ratchet up their prices for council or government work, it hard to find this currency challenged by our elected representatives.

Red Tape needs cutting

The orange cone epidemic is a Red Tape issue more than safety-driven policy. And it is available for a quick cut, saving millions of dollars for every community across the nation while restoring corporate and personal responsibility as envisaged in law.

At its core, this is an important example of how public policy no matter how well-intentioned aberrates within 21st century management structures, at the fingertips of unworldly policy writers, ill-equipped executives, and the spin-doctoring of public accountability and economic responsibility.

Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown gained praise and extensive publicity on orange cones and potential savings when exposing his City Council’s $145million spend on Temporary Traffic Management Plans (TTMP)s – in many cases the plans costing more than the work to be undertaken.

In Hamilton, a Waikato Times journalist used the Official Information Act to find out and share the news that the City Council’s $700,000 project to “shift a bus stop 100 metres down” Anglesea Street included $130,000 for “traffic management”. As seems to be the current style, the council’s eight-page report on this ‘low cost-low risk project’ did not include the dollars (but neither it seems did councillors seek the cost).

Not a new issue

But this is not such a new issue. I had a farewell coffee in 2022 with retiring Waikato District mayor Alan Sanson who spluttered about the new ‘health and safety’ requirements that year, and yet another claim on the public purse with little factual regard for public and workplace safety (or risk).  ‘Even a tiny berm garden alongside a street now requires its own Temporary Traffic Management Plan (TTMP)… with dozens of new companies set up to deliver them’, he explained. In fact, any work bordering a road requires its own plan and dozens of orange cones.  As well, the workers are required to do health and safety training, two or three days, with costs for certification ranging from a few to several hundred dollars.

This in part explains why so many councils have so many unkempt street berms full of weeds (another hot topic of community chat).

In November that year, a national news outlet (Stuff) picked up the issue, with the headline “The road cones that ruined Christmas…” and quoted developers concerned the traffic management industry was “extortionate gouging”.  The cones ‘drove up house prices’ and ‘killed Christmas parades’ because of cost and legal liabilities for volunteers. The article reported that council controlled Watercare was paying $60-70m annually for traffic management, with Vector Energy $60m while “trying to work with Waka Kotahi and Auckland Transport to explore alternatives”. Auckland transport was unable to provide figures ‘because it is built into project costs’, and traffic management companies did not want to comment. Community chat refers to $5 a day a cone hire cost, and website rates use a cheaper/longer formula.

Red Tape and the 2023 model

My recent morning with Google confirmed this is simply a Red Tape issue, reflecting current culture, hopefully with the best of intentions but excessively cumbersome and costly with little depth of thought into actual risk (or evidence).  It became an incentive for contractors to up their prices with the flow on impact sprouting new profit-oriented planning and training enterprises (even an Australian company entering the NZ market place with expansion in mind, I’m told)

At the core is the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, with the Transport Agency and WorkSafe, major contracting company Downers (& others) developing the April 2023 Guidelines for TTMPs and the State Highway policy spilling over into Local Government. This confirmed the concept of TTMPs for every ‘job’ (take that as one pothole) plus all those prescriptive add-ons for training and certification for absolutely everyone on site. As well as the tsunami of work for traffic planners (& their new companies?).

The legal requirement comes from employers having the primary responsibility to protect their workers from harm during work. Folk-talk is of ‘gold-plated overkill’, and evidences the private sector ability to simply add all these new TTMP costs into their price while the public sector just coughs up. This because of inadequate professional insights and accountability, local government failure to resist/negotiate/refuse such prescriptive rules, and the ongoing assumptions (wrong) that ‘top shelf’ prices mean top quality and long reports are ‘essential’. Even the 2023 official guide to TTMPs spreads to 88 pages with references to each site being ‘unique’ (take that as meaning an individual TTMP).

Immediate Action is recommended.

Our local leaders need to engage openly with local contractors, assess the cost/benefits and risks (real ones), and come up with a better way.  This should bring an estimated billion-dollar cost savings to public budgets for central and local government, reduce transport contract prices, and prune considerable official fat.

Brevity

As well as the careful pruning of the Red Tape involved, there should be clear instructions to public officials and overly enthusiastic policy writers that ‘brevity’ will be the new order. ‘Plain Finance’ pointing to likely costs should join the 2022 ‘Plain English’ requirement, and excessively long Parliamentary Order Papers and Council agendas will be forwarded to the waste bin, with no more pretence that they have been read.

Tauranga commissioner Anne Tolley took rapid action against 500-page council agendas (disclosed in a recent interview) just as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill instructed his Cabinet on ‘Brevity’ in their tough times in WW2’s blitz as German warplanes dropped hundreds of bombs daily over London.

One of Tolley’s first actions was to put a stop to the “impossible” 500-page agendas for each council meeting. “I said ‘I never want to see this again … how can any person read this, digest it?’ My colleagues felt the same, we just thought ‘this is crazy’ and it was simply the habit that the organisation had got into because decisions weren’t being made, more information was always asked for.” Tolley says the council was focused on process and reporting “and we had to change that”.

We want stuff delivered,” she says.

Chairwoman Anne Tolley on Tauranga City Council commission’s legacies, Kiri Gillespie, Bay of Plenty Times, 14 April 2024.

Don’t we all?

 

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