Dev Strause: Traffic Direct General Manager on the new framework to reduce NZTA's costs

The Transport Agency's spending is in the spotlight. 

The Transport Minister's calling NZTA's costs “eye-watering” and excessive after revealing a near $800 million spend on traffic management over the past three years. 

Simeon Brown says a new framework is coming to reduce costs. 

Traffic Direct General Manager Dev Strause told Mike Hosking it will be made, but change doesn't happen overnight. 

He says it takes a bit of fine tuning to be able to redevelop and retrain all the workers, especially when some have been in the industry for over a decade. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Is there as much talk about road cones as there
are road cones? New number yesterday from the minister who promised,
of course, to do something about roadcones. Simeon Brown told
us the traffic management costs is three and three quarters
of a billion, seven hundred and fifty million dollars three
quarters of a billion dollars and that number is one
I watering, and two doesn't include the local council expenditure.
He claims changes underway now. Traffic direct General Manager Dev

(00:23):
Strauss is with us on all of this deav morning
modern is change underway.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
I would be able to say, and other parts of
the industry, yes, I do believe it, but it just
doesn't happen just like that. I'd be vera common to say,
why not the new rollout with the industry code practices.
It takes a bit of fine tuning to be able

(00:53):
to redevelop and retrain everybody what they've held for the
last ten plus fourteen year. Is some that have been
in the industry for so long?

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Is it a recipe in other words of your like
my big experiences on off ramps on motorways coming to
work at two thirty in the morning, is there a
recipe is you want to close an off ramp and
you've got to lay up eighty seven cones and a
truck to block the off ramp?

Speaker 2 (01:17):
Is that?

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Is that how you do it? Or you make it
up or how does it work?

Speaker 2 (01:21):
No? These the diagrams are set out by by each
Road Corridor Authority RCA in this instance being an orphant,
and there is a what we some partners are still
using the comptum kind of practice traffic management menu and

(01:44):
that's derived and brought about by the then NZTA, which
sort of sets out how something should be implemented.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Have they changed anything? Are you getting the word from
the NZTA that sime and in town and he's shaking
things up and we're using fewer cones that we're getting
on with life or is that not filtered through yet?

Speaker 2 (02:08):
I have heard through the great mind that there are
some changes coming. It's to be honest, it's a matter
of when they intend to adopt that process.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
So simply we're waiting for the official word, and when
the official word comes through, yield that here to it
and life will be different.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Pretty much. That's the way forward.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
Good stuff, dev I'm glad we got there. On the
n dev Strauss. It's not Dev's fault at Simon's. I'm
increasingly of the view that people like Simeon are really
good at making announcements and not good at action. For
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