{"id":92589,"date":"2025-10-21T18:18:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-21T18:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/92589\/"},"modified":"2025-10-21T18:18:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T18:18:12","slug":"sunlive-road-workers-abused-hit-ignored-by-drivers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/92589\/","title":{"rendered":"SunLive – Road workers abused, hit, ignored by drivers"},"content":{"rendered":"

A survey of road workers has found many are routinely abused, attacked and sometimes purposefully hit with cars.<\/p>\n

The report found nearly two-thirds of traffic controllers were verbally abused on a weekly basis, and one in five had been physically assaulted over the past year.<\/p>\n

The survey, by the Temporary Traffic Management Industry Steering Group, included 667 workers across New Zealand<\/a> who described their experiences and near-misses.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was confronted by the frequency,\u201d steering group chairman Darren Wu told Nine to Noon.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve heard a lot of this anecdotally but now we have some statistical data that can help us understand what this real life situation looks like for them and quite frankly it\u2019s unacceptable.<\/p>\n

\u201c[They\u2019re] being shouted and yelled at, sworn at or threatened<\/a>. Drivers [are] refusing to stop, so not following some critical instructions at road works sites that are looking after the wellbeing and safety of road users.\u201d<\/p>\n

In some cases, frustrated drivers had struck workers with their cars.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were about 5% of road workers that were actually struck by a moving vehicle in the past year. Most of these were at low speeds, but some of these were at life-threatening forces,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cEither someone wasn\u2019t paying attention, whether they\u2019re a distracted driver or speeding and fail to stop in time, [or] they don\u2019t want to stop… There are anecdotal cases where I\u2019ve been told that drivers are so frustrated they don\u2019t want to listen and they don\u2019t want to wait.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wu said road workers<\/a> regularly experienced near-misses.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost 50% have experienced near misses both from distracted drivers and speeding drivers. Either not abiding by the temporary speed, or distracted by something like a mobile phone so by the time they do spot something there\u2019s a really near-miss.\u201d<\/p>\n

But he acknowledged that it had become common for drivers to ignore temporary speed limits.<\/p>\n

\"Road

\nRoad workers regularly experienced near-misses. Photo \/ Bevan Conley<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes those temporary speeds \u2013 we know we need to do a little bit of work around this \u2013 don\u2019t always make sense,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo for example, if they\u2019ve just laid some fresh chip seal on the road they will keep temporary speeds out there because it\u2019s slippery. But if there\u2019s no road workers out there, we know that sometimes road users will just ignore the speeds.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the industry could do more to alleviate that issue, and others.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s well known, and we appreciate this, that roadworks can be disruptive and frustrating,\u201d Wu said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe as a sector have an opportunity to improve the way in which we communicate.\u201d<\/p>\n

RNZ<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A survey of road workers has found many are routinely abused, attacked and sometimes purposefully hit with cars.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92590,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-92589","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92589","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=92589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92589\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}