Alan Wallace: Auckland Transport head of road maintenance on avoiding summer roadworks

Over 450 kilometres of Auckland roads will be getting a refresh in the coming weeks as droves of Aucklanders head out of town for summer. 

Auckland Transport's head of road maintenance Alan Wallace joined Andrew Dickens to chat about how people can best avoid the roadworks.

Wallace said, "everything we're doing, we're trying to do it in a way that minimises how it affects others." 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
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Speaker 2 (00:16):
Starting today, over four hundred and fifty kilometers of Auckland
roads will be getting a refresh for the summer season
because the orchids have headed out of town, so Orcan
Transport is squirreling away repairing and resealing major parts of
key roads. And to tell you how to avoid these
roadworks over the holiday period, I'm joined by Alan Wallace
and Alan is eighties head of road maintenance. Hell Alan,

(00:37):
how are you?

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Yeah? Hi? Yeah, good thing too.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
What roads are going to be repaired this summer.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Well, quite a lot of them. Yeah, Look, this is
the biggest program for ten years. So yeah, over one
hundred and over four and fifty k's of road we're
going to be receptd thing, but we're going to be
fully reabilitating another twelve tweven and a half k's on
top of that. So look over the next few days
there'll be big projects kicking off on on Ouray Road

(01:08):
also Great South Road. Yeah yeah, okay.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Look you talk about sort of repairs and you also
talk about full rehabilitation. What people are getting worried about
is when the roads get done, you put down the
chip stuff, which of course you know has stones flying
all over the place of damages to the paintwork, et cetera.
And they prefer to have full rehabilitation with the full resurfacing.

(01:34):
Are you relying on the chip more than the resurface.

Speaker 4 (01:39):
Well, we're going to be doing about one hundred kilometers
of our main roads, all the ash Felt Andrews, so book, yeah,
that work all the main roads.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
Hopefully people won't notice it. We get a lot of
efforts to do this work in a way that minimizes
disruption in convenience of people. Nearly or aspelt work is
done at night, so look that work's going on all
the time. People go to sleep, get up, the work's completed,
the roads we marked. So yeah, we do a lot

(02:13):
of assh up work. Now with the rehab work, which
is a full weeks instruction of the pavement, we have
to be there a bit longer. We go to a
lot of there's a lot of planning before we can
get a prooval to go on the network. So everything
we're doing we're trying to do in the way that
minimizes how it affects others.

Speaker 4 (02:30):
Great.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
Okay, is there a place people can go to find
out about the disruptions on their commute?

Speaker 3 (02:36):
Yeah, definitely, yes, go to it, go to our website. Yeah,
that information's there. But look, we're doing this work in
a way that there should be. We're minimizing inconvenience. We're
doing all the work we can at night. We're doing
all we can to keep roads open when we're doing

(02:58):
that work. So we choose methodologies that mean we can
be quick. We keep two way flow open if we can.
The work we're doing on breaks our throw down the
technomy straight. We will be maintaining two way flow will
be there maximum twelve days, and we kick that off
on the fifth of January so that we get that

(03:20):
quiet week and we'll hopefully have pretty much all the
week done before people come back the following week.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Allen, stop talking to me and get to work, and
I thank you for your time today, Alan Wallace, who's
organ Transport's head of road maintenance.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
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