The road cone plague

The Herald reports:

Transport Minister Simeon Brown is coming for road cones, announcing a suite of measures that he says will curb the excessive use of the traffic management tool on our streets.

Brown said the current level of temporary traffic management (TTM) was “out of control”.

“Excessive use of road cones and temporary speed limit reductions – sometimes left in place when work is complete – simply increases cost, forces people to slow down, and frustrates drivers,” Brown said.

“In fact, the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) conducted a review of TTM at 800 maintenance worksites on the state highway network across the country in February and found that 145 of these sites were not needed, showing how out of control the use of road cones and temporary traffic management has become,” Brown said.

This does not surprise me. A couple of days ago spent around five minutes in a queue as four roads had been made one way under traffic management due to some work being done. But the work was not on any road. It was on the large median strip between roads. A few years ago there would have been no traffic management and workers would simply wait for a break in traffic to cross the road.