{"id":488284,"date":"2026-06-21T10:21:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-21T10:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/488284\/"},"modified":"2026-06-21T10:21:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-21T10:21:09","slug":"gone-too-far-wellington-water-traffic-management-under-fire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/488284\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Gone too far’: Wellington Water traffic management under fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Wellington councillor is calling out what she claims are over-the-top Wellington Water road traffic management measures during pipe repairs, which are driving up the costs of minor works.<\/p>\n

Andrea Compton shared an email to Wellington Water and Wellington City Council on Facebook in which she encouraged a review into traffic management practices.<\/p>\n

As a recent example, she cited repair works at Tawa Terrace in Tawa, where she said a small leak from a valve a couple of metres from the kerb had led to three sets of temporary traffic signals and three traffic management staff onsite over about a kilometre of road.<\/p>\n

Wellington Water said the level of traffic management was appropriate for the site and it adhered to standards.<\/p>\n

It added that new codes of practice would be rolled out by councils across the country from next month.<\/p>\n

Compton said there might be “opportunities to adopt simpler traffic management arrangements that continue to provide an appropriate level of safety, while reducing cost, disruption and resource requirements”.<\/p>\n

Compton told RNZ the council needed to re-evaluate its risk appetite when managing construction on roads.<\/p>\n

“We’ve gone too far in terms of mitigation of risk for minor works.”<\/p>\n

With water bills set to “skyrocket”, she wanted Wellington Water – or new entity Tiaki Wai, which takes over the city’s water assets<\/a> from July – to look at its cost structure and ways to reduce expenses.<\/p>\n

Wellingtonians will pay an average of $2390 this coming financial year for their water bills to Tiaki Wai – a 13.3 percent increase to the average $2100 currently included in council rates.<\/p>\n

In her post, Compton said these highly visible traffic management measures fuelled concerns about cost-effectiveness at a time when there was higher scrutiny around public spending.<\/p>\n

She told RNZ she was emailed weekly by Wellingtonians concerned about the council “overengineering solutions to essentially minor works”.<\/p>\n

A Wellington Water spokesperson said it had accessed the road corridor under standards set and required by the council.<\/p>\n

“In this instance, traffic management was required to repair a leak on Tawa Terrace. As the work was located on the Tawa Terrace\/Bartlett Grove intersection, visibility for road users is limited.<\/p>\n

“The traffic management plan used was approved by council, as the road controlling authority for works in this type of road environment.<\/p>\n

“From 1 July, all councils are moving to a different national code of practice for traffic management, which replaces the current prescribed standards and allows for a risk-based approach.”<\/p>\n

Wellington City Council said the urgent water repair in question had not needed council approval for traffic-control arrangements. It said the works were at an intersection, which heightened the need for traffic control.<\/p>\n

The council declined to respond to questions about systematic, disproportionate traffic control measures for works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Wellington councillor is calling out what she claims are over-the-top Wellington Water road traffic management measures during…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488285,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-488284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488284","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=488284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}