Entry 2404, on 2025-07-18 at 16:55:03 (Rating 3, Comments)
Road cones seem to have recently become a metaphor for bureaucracy, ineptitude, inefficiency, and waste. Various stats have estimated how much extra time and cost they add to typical roading projects, and depending on your source it is either moderately small or very significant. It also depends on the time the project takes, of course, because taking a day to place them and a day to retrive them again is trivial for a project which takes a year, but significant if the project only takes a day.
But it's not specifically road cones I am talking about, because as you well know, I like to look at a bigger picture. So unnecessary bureaucracy also extends to the legal requirements for projects to be evaluated for things like their environmental effects and the effects of the opinions of local Maori groups.
Of course, I am not an absolutist on this, because I think there have to be some checks on new projects, but it is really a matter of degree and fairness. For example, if a road repair project is in a clear stretch of road, has the necessary speed limit signs or traffic control by lights or "lollipop men" in place, and isn't going to take long to complete, I think road cones can be minimised or even eliminated.
Other examples where efficiency might be improved include not surveying sites for extremely unlikely problems, such as land stability where the area has already been established as stable (maybe after a previous similar project) and not requiring consultation with groups who have no or only a minor interest.
Then there's fairness. It seems, anecdotally, that consultation with Maori groups for just about anything is getting out of hand, despite the current government assuring us they would get that under control. People must consult with local Maori tribes on many different aspects of projects now, even if they have no direct interest, and then are often required to pay for various forms of Maori traditions, like karakia (prayers) when the project is officially opened.
Is it fair to mandate that one particular cultural tradition must be observed while ignoring all the others? OK, if the people in charge of the project want a Maori prayer, or a Catholic one, or even some sort of Islamic ceremony, fair enough, if you can justify it with those who are paying. But it needs to be optional, and not part of any law, policy, or regulation, as often seems to be the case now.
Recently there have been quite serious floods in various parts of the country, especially the Tasman region, and the official clean-up does seem to be proceeding fairly well, to be fair. But I just heard this morning about an example of where "just do it" almost certainly turned out to be more efficient than the traditional, bureaucratic approach.
A tree and various debris fell across a road and needed to be cleared. So a few "good blokes" just happened to be passing with some equipment suitable for fixing the problem. They had the road cleared again in 15 minutes, and without a single road cone! Now I don't know for sure, but I suspect that would have taken several days normally. It will be interesting to see if there are any repercussions for this unofficial repair work being done without the correct permission.
I am almost certain that the current safety rules were put in place after accidents in the past, but these things tend to be an overreaction to a single event. For example, if there is an earthquake in one part of the country (as there was here), every building with even a small earthquake risk must be closed or repaired at great cost.
But getting back to the road cones, I know of several areas of "road works" where there are cones and signs everywhere warning drivers about a problem which doens't exist. There is an area I drive past where the cones and signs themselves are by far the biggest risk because they are placed near the curb on a narrow road giving less space to safely get past vehicles coming the opposite way. And what road works are being done there? Absolutely nothing: no workers, no holes dug in the road, no heavy machinery, nothing.
Everything we do has some risk, and road construction and repair has some with or without the cones and other safety measures. There might be times where a few cones are fine, to mark the location of damaged parts of the road for example, but in my recent travels I would say that well over half of the cases where they are used would be better without any at all, and most of the rest could do with about a quarter of the number used.
Am I an expert on how safety measures should be used in road repairs? Well no, but neither are the people who made the rules requiring them. Maybe we can't do without them completely, but currently I think it is clear, there are too many road cones!
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