Vanessa Browne, Interim Group General Manager Transport Services, NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi, looks back on 2024 and forward to the rest of this year.
Happy new year and thank you to those who worked through the holidays to deliver our busy summer maintenance and renewals season while keeping people moving safely through our worksites.
While Brett Gliddon is interim CE, I’m leading NZTA’s Transport Services team, and over the past few months I’ve been engaging more directly with many of you in the sector.
Challenging, but equally inspiring, is a common thread of conversation and description of 2024. On behalf of the NZTA, thank you for your contribution, I’m grateful for our collective achievements over the last year. Together we’ve delivered a significant work programme of emergency response, maintenance and large infrastructure projects, and we’ve also strengthened how we work together.
What stands out most is how we’ve been agile to refocus on priorities and to adapt to new ways of working to be more efficient and effective.
New priorities and new investment
Over the last year we’ve seen some big moves in the transport sector – a new 10-year strategic direction via the Government Policy Statement 2024 (GPS 2024) and along with it record levels of future investment in our land transport network. This brings a new focus and a number of opportunities for the NZTA and the wider sector.
In September last year the 2024-27 National Land Transport Programme (NLTP) outlined how the NZTA and its local government partners will deliver on the priorities of the GPS 2024 over the next three years. It’s a blueprint for what will be a key focus and determines how much funding is available.
Via the NLTP, a record $32.9 billion investment will be focussed on transport priorities to drive economic growth and productivity, safety, value for money and improve maintenance and renewals.
Focus on maintenance and renewals
Road maintenance is a key focus with $4.3 billion being invested into state highway maintenance to improve the overall condition of the network. In response, we expect to complete at least 2100 lane kilometres of road rebuilding and resealing over the 2024/25 summer maintenance and renewals season.
Many of you are involved in this work and will know that we are taking a different approach this year – we’re investing in longer lasting, high-quality road rebuild treatments. These are more intensive and take longer to complete than just resealing the road. This means road users will see more worksites on the network across the country this summer, and potentially more disruption on local roads.
State Highway 1 between Tirau and Waiouru is one example – this is an accelerated programme of work with four years’ of renewals condensed into 16 months by closing sections of the state highway to complete long stretches of renewals.
Last year also saw dedicated investment and funding for pothole repairs and we’ve consistently met our new targets since they were set in July. During winter 2024 we saw the use of new materials, such as pre-fabricated patches and new machinery, that help create longer-term solutions and reduce the need to return to the same location multiple times over winter.
What to expect for 2025
For the rest of the year, we expect our transport networks to be busier than ever delivering a bigger maintenance and capital works programme.
One of the biggest priorities announced during 2024 was the Roads of National Significance (RoNS) programme.
This is an ambitious 10-year pipeline of work that gives the sector clarity to plan ahead but also requires NZTA, its contractors and the wider sector to work consistently together to deliver efficiently, effectively and at pace.
The scale of delivery is unprecedented with construction expected to start on seven of the 17 RoNS projects within the next three years. To meet this ambition we’re working closely with our contractors and suppliers to develop a construction pipeline to deliver these projects that will take a phased approach to balance resource, capability and capacity.
I’m pleased to say we’ve made some significant progress already. Activities underway include market engagement for the Northland Corridor, enabling works on the Hawkes Bay Expressway, geotechnical investigations on Warkworth to Te Hana and Cambridge to Piarere, and the Request for Tender for the detailed design of the Belfast to Pegasus motorway and the Woodend Bypass.
For the rest of 2025, we expect to complete all the investment cases for all RoNS projects by June. We’ve mapped out milestones for when we lodge the consents for Takitimu North Link Stage 2, and we expect to start construction on Otaki to North of Levin, the main works of the Hawke’s Bay Expressway, and the Omanawa Bridge replacement.
In the maintenance space, we know winter 2025 will see a return to focus on maintenance and pothole repairs to ensure Kiwis have a state highway network that is safe and accessible.
We’re also rolling out our new model for maintenance contracts with the Request for Tender procurement of our Integrated Delivery Model starting from next month, February 2025.
Clearly 2025 will be another busy year – I look forward to continuing to work with you.
Parting words from Jeremy Sole- a final column