BROADCASTS.com

b'

Love this idea of a 50-year plan for the roads.

It\'s come out of Road Carriers Association.

The incoming Prime Minister has said he wants to focus on the big issues confronting business, and the trucking industry says this is one of them.

And they\'re right. We always seem to be playing catch-up on our roading projects, and right now we need some catch-up on repairs too.

Ask anyone who comes here to visit from any first world country. They\'ll either say they love driving here because it\'s like being on a rally circuit, or they\'ll scoff at the idea we call a metalled goat-track a State Highway, and that it\'s taken nearly eight years of construction to add 18 kilometres to the Northern Motorway.

That\'s the construction phase, coming after years planning, years of consultation and resource consent work, years of acquiring the land.

And now, after years of painfully slow construction work: a massive bill. And of course, a dispute with the contractors who\'ve got their hands out for another couple of hundred million.

By the time it opens \\u2014maybe the new PM will last long enough to cut the tape, maybe not\\u2014 it will have cost over 60 thousand dollars a metre.

Steven Joyce, bless him, had a crack at long-term planning with the "Roads of National Significance" project. It was launched in 2009, and the petrol tax and road user charges went up to pay for it. Labour mocked it, and started putting the brakes on the minute they got a chance.

Luckily some jobs were already in the pipeline, and as we begin 2023...we\'re about half finished.

In the grand scheme of things, that\'s not actually so bad for roading projects.

But it demonstrates how poorly the stop-go approach we\'ve got is serving us.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.