earlier this year<\/a>, requiring councils to follow a risk-based approach to temporary traffic management to access Government funding.<\/p>\n‘A complete waste of money’<\/p>\n
Labour’s transport spokesperson Tangi Utikere criticised the hotline, saying occasional misplacement of cones did not justify the cost of the programme.<\/p>\n
“That does not justify the expense of implementing and maintaining a hotline,” he said.<\/p>\n
“This is an absolute farce from the Government, a complete waste of money, and waste of resource, pumping people and money into trying to sort out an issue that clearly does not exist.”<\/p>\n
Van Velden said the pilot was providing “value for money”, with a cost of $148,545 as of September 30.<\/p>\n
“This was significantly less than budgeted and funded from within WorkSafe\u2019s existing baselines.”<\/p>\n
She added the pilot had helped strengthen relationships with those responsible for temporary traffic management, referred to as TTM, and was part of ongoing work with NZTA to improve a risk-based approach to road safety.<\/p>\n
“The hotline is meeting its objectives to provide the public with a feedback mechanism, identifies the causes of concern about excessive TTM, and clarifies the role of WorkSafe and the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 in relation to TTM,” van Velden said.<\/p>\n
“We are now six months into the road cone hotline pilot, and next steps are currently under consideration.”<\/p>\n
The majority of road cone reports have come from Auckland and the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA).<\/p>\n
Wellington and Christchurch follow as the next most reported locations, while councils such as Hutt, Tauranga, Whang\u0101rei and Western Bay of Plenty contribute smaller but steady numbers of reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly six months after its launch with much fanfare, the Government’s road cone hotline is receiving an average…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":161524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[138,687,111,139,69,135,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-161523","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-housing-and-infrastructure","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-politics","14":"tag-transport"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/161524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=161523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=161523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}