“Truckers demand billion dollar spend to fix dilapidated roads” is just the latest in a decades-long history of trucking companies with their hands out to us for the destruction their trucks cause to our roads.
One single eight tonne axle does the same damage to a road as 10,000 cars so some of these big trucks – carrying up to sixty tonne loads over seven axles – will do the same damage as 70,000 cars travelling over the same road.
Do the trucking companies pay for the damage they cause? No – not even a tiny fraction of the cost. They pay road user charges but – surprise, surprise – these are not set at 70,000 times the tax on petrol!
Trucking companies are adept at using motorist complaints about poor roads to bully successive governments into spending billions on road maintenance. Meanwhile they work hard to undermine government spending on rail transport at every turn.
The poster boy for political sellouts in transport is former Labour MP Richard Prebble who ran a campaign to “Save Rail” and then set about destroying it on behalf of corporate truckers once he was elected in 1984.
Surely it’s time we buried Prebble’s legacy under a rebuilt rail network which would be cheaper, more efficient and with a much lower carbon footprint.
Of course the damage done to roads that the trucking lobby are whining about has absolutely nothing to do with the 55 tonne weight trucks they convinced Steven Joyce were a benefit to mankind, has it? Everyone but that tit and National knew it would happen but they let it happen anyway. Money talks, eh National?
And given they donate big to National, who really cares what this lobby group think. Fuck them! Best ignored and perhaps consideration to downsizing these things should be looked at, immediately.
All too true, John.
The ‘good news; is that the economy that generated the outrages you have listed is in terminal decline, and the legacy of the madness will be a network of roads that cannot be maintained, and a completely wrecked climate.
The main problem with large scale rail freight (someone can correct me if i’m wrong) is the gauge and the mostly single line usage between main centers. Sure you could build this up however the investment to do it properly would be in the realms of 30-40 billion when you factor in NZ’s topography and current lack of infrastructure.
The real issue is that road users aren’t being put back into the roads and are going into the main income pot of the government and being pissed up against the wall on such things as Taranaki Ewok villages. Indeed if petrol tax and road users charges were re-invested into transport and not general expenditure there would be more than enough to meet our road requirements and indeed feasibility funding of rail and maritime transportation initiatives.
Attack heavy transport all you like however it’s a redundant argument unless you have a viable alternative which doesn’t exist unless you have a few spare billion. Unfortunately Grant has pissed this all up against a wall in order to guarantee an election.
Consume less !!
There is nothing wrong with 3ft 6in Cape Gauge, just pop over and have a look at monsters on the QLD Rail lines or in WA excluding the ones up in the Pilbara which are Standard Gauge. We mustn’t forget that Japan also uses Cape Gauge as well.
QLD Rail operations do show you what could happen if the NZ Rail Network was upgraded to almost the same standard be freight or for high speed pax trains. A sample upgrade to NZ Railways would be the increase the loading gauge and axle weights back to pre privatisation standards where speeds on the main trunks lines was a 100kph not the current 80kph. Then you have re-alignment programs to ease the curves and straighten rail lines especially those lines outside of the NIMT.
The irony is that the trucking industry is complaining about the state of the roads it is causing
Well said XRAY, John,esoteric pineapples, Afewknowthetruth, covid is pa
trucks are ruining our climate too, with spewing our kg of toxic Tyre dust every time a 32 wheeler drives a load to a port and that “micro-plastic particles” comes off every Tyre and is washed off our roads into our water supplies and estuaries and into the sea and winds up washing onto the polar ice caps and that black tyre dust attracts the suns heat and speeds up the melting of the polar ice caps and ends up flooding our roads as the sea level rises.
End result; – trucks are killing there own futures silly people they are, railing against rail because rail has no tyre pollution as rail freight only travels on steel tracks with steel wheels.
So as public enemy number one WAKE UP!! – ‘Nick Legett’ of the (RTF) ‘road transport forum’ – you silly man!!!
Public enemy number one is the trucking industry get back onto rail!!!!.
They are right about our roads being in a mess and patchwork like. But the TRUCKS are causing a lot of it and so is the poor standard of road building and the increase of cars due to the increase in our population, due to the lack of planning of infrastructure to deal with more people and more cars.
No. You’re incorrect @ C i P. It’s heavy transport that’s causing road surface decay. Cars, by contrast have so little an impact on tarseal road surfaces that it’s difficult to calculate just how much damage they cause.
FYI
“The relationship between vehicle axle loadings and pavement wear on local roads June 2017”
https://www.nzta.govt.nz/assets/resources/603/RR-603-The-relationship-between-vehicle-axle-loadings-and-pavement-wear2.pdf
And I’d argue that AO/NZ’s road maintenance crews do a world class job at repairing existing, and building new tar seal roads.
And it’s not a lack of planning either.
Road designs in AO/NZ are excellent, particularly given the funding. The new motorway south of Christchurch for example is a superb piece of public works.
There’s zero argument against rail freight and a world of pain coming out of road transport.
And now ? Heavy transport operators are whining about the poor condition of the roads they fucked and expect we tax payers to bail them out ! Fuck off !
I see that the ever wondrous person of the year and third world work force exploiter SIR stevie tindal is one of the farces behind building a hydrogen pump infrastructure throughout the main transport service routes around AO/NZ.
How about, stevie? Bargain basement Knight and where everyone gets fucked over, we build hydrogen filling stations for what are now diesel trains to ship fifty times more freight per trip than trucks can and zero impact on state funded roads and the climate?
No coin for you in it though aye mate? Trying to keep ahead of the times? Your days are numbered son.
John, agree. God knows where the power lies with this govt.
A number of years ago I was at a meeting in a Pres church on Willis St when another attendee, Coralie Leyland, raised the railways issue with speaker Richard Prebble.
He lost his temper and raised his voice at her. No-one should have been spoken to the way this lady was, esp an older woman. I was sitting on the outside seat of the right aisle where Prebble was pacing. He frightened me, and I’m not a shrinking violet. But in effect, the whole audience more or less froze from this point on – maybe because of the unexpectedness of his inappropriate behaviour; little shit.
Good on you @ JM for broaching this laughable situation.
@ Xray and @ E P are correct too in their appraisals of a crooked industry.
dick prebble aye. Mr “I’ve Been Thinking.”
This is a brief explanation of who was behind the set-up then destroy tactic to give road transport a monopoly in freight distribution in AO/NZ. Just follow the links.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_Railways_Corporation
Was it pig muldoon who thought big and pulled up railway lines into our primary industry hinterlands?
The Last Train to Clyde.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mefUBJR7vOk
The deliberate sabotage of OUR rail system to create wealth for a couple of bludger, scumbag heavy transport operators?
OUR electricity now has ‘retailers’ who literally can’t tell you what it is, in fact, that they do.
OUR cell phone and internet should be paid for from a stipend from taxation then freely available to us all.
Road freight is a swindle and to prove that, drive between Gore and Frankton, between Dunedin and Alexandra etc etc and you will see the bridges and embankments of what were our railway tracks well built and would have lasted for generations now all gone. Pulled up by corrupt arseholes now imbedded within our country’s political systems.
I thought the Apple and Pear Marketing Board decided to use road transport instead of rail to ship fruits from Central Otago to Dunedin. To be shipped to Australia and sold cheaply by Watties.
Our beautiful AO/NZ’s a deeply corrupt, dirty little country. I could say it was run by the mafia but the mafia have class. Our lot are simply white, pot bellied, vulgar riche with their dirt under someone else’s fingernails.
Crowd fund forensic political and financial investigators and you’ll be shocked at what they find.
N.B. IN my personal opinion.
The Apple and Pear Marketing Board, a producer board who’s sole mission was as a reliable supply of cheap fruits for export to line Wattie’s pockets forbade growers from selling their export grade fruits at road side stalls.
I know. I was there at the time eating huge, ripe Central Otago peaches in the back of Pop’s old 51’ Ford V8.
AO/NZ has no idea just how mind blowingly ripped off we’ve been.
Trucking companies shredding tax paid for roads is a tiny, little, almost insignificant element of the grand swindles. I call them The Great and Institutionalised Lies.
We have to have rail, sure the ones we have got use them, there are plenty of them anything that is travelling more than100 kilometres should go on existing rail if the area has rail. Plenty of room for truckies in other areas.
And travel on trains for we human beings that is a must, get the lines all up and running again. As a retiree I would take the train to Invercargill stopping on the way staying a night in a motel at several places. Right now is when this would really work.
The fact is we all pay for the tearing up of our roads.
And travel on trains for we human beings that is a must, get the lines all up and running again.
One single eight tonne axle does the same damage to a road as 10,000 cars so some of these big trucks – carrying up to sixty tonne loads over seven axles – will do the same damage as 70,000 cars travelling over the same road
Trains are great for bulk movement but that is only a small percentage of the freight carried. I worked for a Chch hospitality firm and need to get freight to all parts of South Island . Some freight trucks had as many as 50 drop offs to isolated towns and business in the middle of nowhere before they reach their final destination . We only have 5 million people spread out in 2 Islands that is long and thin with mountain ranges that are not stable subject to earthquakes floods etc. We cannot spend a fortune on rail that can easily be wiped out like the Kaikoura line. Without trucks being able to divert to an inland route overnight we would have been in deep shit.
The quality of road build is very poor but that is what happens when the lowest tender is excepted which is the norm which ever government is in power
Trains are great for bulk movement but that is only a small percentage of the freight carried. I worked for a Chch hospitality firm and need to get freight to all parts of South Island . Some freight trucks had as many as 50 drop offs to isolated towns and business in the middle of nowhere before they reach their final destination . We only have 5 million people spread out in 2 Islands that is long and thin with mountain ranges that are not stable subject to earthquakes floods etc. We cannot spend a fortune on rail that can easily be wiped out like the Kaikoura line. Without trucks being able to divert to an inland route overnight we would have been in deep shit.
The quality of road build is very poor but that is what happens when the lowest tender is excepted which is the norm which ever government is in power
TS Where there is a will there’s a way. The South Island needs an inland route for sure, it is vulnerable on the coastline. But once done it would offer a valuable pathway of a long lasting type. A lot of stuff could go into containers that would be offloaded along the way and trucked locally. Things have to change. Last century’s methods won’t take us to 2050.
Rebuild rail and fuck what is effectively bailing out the trucking industry.
And while we’re at it, grab back Ear NuZull. Thanks Sir John (not very much) but it always was going to be an inevitability.
And while we’re at it, consider taking a few (now parked up assets) and give them for the Air Force to replace those 757 dungers. Second a few crew to the AirForce as well to keep them in jobs jobs jobs. Even one or two or three of those ATRs could be used to do the weekly electorate-to-parliament Polly run
Totally agree John.
The main engineering issue that keeps NZ railways hobbled is the current pitiful 18t or lower axle load limit. We are stuck in the mid 20th century and the SOE that runs rail knows it.
The main political issue maintaining the hobbled status quo is the upper SOE management are pro National voting trucking companies – just as in the Holyoake and Muldoon and Lange eras.
The current SOE is being run by the son of the late JB Gordon to ‘continue fathers legacy’.
Not just trucks, the public ocean is now a private cow toilet for overseas owned farms.
Unfucking believable.
Oceania Dairy 7.5km wastewater pipeline consents granted
https://www.stuff.co.nz/timaru-herald/news/122708257/oceania-dairy-75km-wastewater-pipeline-consents-granted
Thanks fuck-wit Greens in parliament for NOT doing your job. Sarcasm. And Labour just as bad for environmental degradation on steroids here.
As well as trucks ruining the roads, apparently motocross bikes are allowed to kill people too, even thought they are supposed to have strict rules (WOF, licensed, lights, indicators) to be able to be ridden in public places and should not be on bike lanes and footpaths.
Parents of dead toddler frustrated as motorcyclists speed along pathway
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/300103119/parents-of-dead-toddler-frustrated-as-motorcyclists-speed-along-pathway
Police seeking witnesses to Muriwai crash
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12350208
YOUNG MAN SERIOUSLY INJURED IN MOTOCROSS BIKE CRASH ON MURIWAI BEACH
https://www.adventureridingnz.co.nz/forums/topic/young-man-seriously-injured-in-motocross-bike-crash-on-muriwai-beach/
Another child killed on a footpath by a truck but gets off and the company does not receive a work place fine. There was no interviewing of the driver who killed Carla Neems from work safe when a waste management truck (Chinese majority owned company) killed her near her own driveway,
The truck had no sensors due to cost (unlike other trucks), to alert known blind spots.
Their driver also found not guilty in judge only trial which work safe ‘investigation’ evidence was questioned. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/112696703/inquest-hears-that-sensor-may-have-saved-girl-killed-by-rubbish-truck
Comments are closed.