Transport is a critical part of supporting New Zealand and New Zealanders to achieve their full potential. The Transport Agency contributes by investing in land transport, managing the state highways and regulating land transport.
Improving the safety of everyone that uses and works on our transport network is our highest priority.
Guided by the Safe System approach to road safety, we:
Following the tragic and unacceptable death of four road workers in Bay of Plenty and Wellington this year, we worked with our construction contractors to implement system-wide improvements for workers in maintenance and construction environments. Trend data over January 2018 to June 2019 shows an improvement in overall staff and contractor injury rates.
On 15 October 2018, we announced an extensive review of open compliance files, and a new tougher approach to strengthen our regulatory responsibilities and functions. We are making progress on a future state phase that will shape our future approach to regulatory compliance. It includes:
We’re making changes that will make transport more accessible and sustainable and will help people use active modes of transport more often.
Through a mode shift strategy, we identified and prioritised what we can do to increase the attractiveness of public transport and walking, cycling and other active modes. We also delivered a travel demand management programme that aims to enable better travel choices.
To support access and economic development in the regions, we improved 152 lane kms of regional state highways and made an additional 1,004km of state highway available to high productivity motor vehicles on key regional routes.
A total of 104.8 network kilometres of walking and cycling facilities were delivered by the Transport Agency and its co-investment partners and cycling trips increased to 6238, up from 5605 last year.
Wellington recorded a 4 percent increase (to 2360 trips), Christchurch a 34 percent increase (to 1869 trips) and Auckland a 3 percent increase (to 2009 trips).
We are working to improve the resilience of the land transport system to climate change–related impacts, increasing traffic volumes, and incidents such as crashes, so communities can recover more quickly from disruption.
We ran a significant programme of Coordinated Incident Management System training for the Transport Agency and its partners to lift capacity and capability for emergency management response.
With local government and other partners, we began to build a shared understanding of risk tolerance for communities and business and improve capability and self-sufficiency to manage disruptive events.
Major achievements this year included developing a draft Sustainability Action Plan and Sustainability Monitoring Framework focused on mitigating climate change, improving public health and reducing environmental harm.
As part of this work, we developed and tested three indicators focused on biodiversity, resource efficiency and environmental management performance that can be used from 2019/20 onwards in Network Outcomes Contracts and for monitoring capital projects.
We also made progress on developing a prioritised programme to deliver on the government’s environmental targets for the transport sector and set baselines for measuring emissions from staff travel.
To become a high-performing organisation, we need to improve our systems, processes and culture to deliver the outcomes we aspire to and to respond to the challenges and opportunities posed by new technologies.
As well as responding quickly to serious issues uncovered in our regulatory and transport technology functions, we focused on stabilising the Transport Agency after a period of unrest and change.
During the year, we conducted surveys to understand what our co-investors, partners and customers think of us. We are now developing a new approach to improving engagement with local government and other key stakeholders.
In December 2018, the Transport Agency’s Board endorsed Te Ara Kotahi / Our Māori Strategy and its supporting action plan. Te Ara Kotahi provides us with an overarching strategic framework that affirms our commitment to uphold our te Tiriti o Waitangi / Treaty of Waitangi and related legislative obligations.
Surveys undertaken this year set baselines for how easily our customers can access travel information. Customers rated the ease of access to information relatively highly and their preferred source of information is Google Maps (the Transport Agency’s travel information feeds into Google Maps).
