NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) is gearing up for a busy summer with significant renewal work scheduled across the Bay of Plenty and Waikato to ensure the region's highways are safe and accessible.
Sandra King, NZTA Bay of Plenty System Manager, says road users will notice more road crews and work sites over the next few months – from now through to the end of March 2025.
"We’re doing as much work as possible between now and mid-December to reduce the impact on people's journeys during the busy holiday season. However, to achieve this we are also heavily reliant on the weather and other factors co-operating.
"This year's maintenance programme aims to renew around 110 single lane kilometres in the Bay of Plenty and around 180 in the Waikato (excluding the Tīrau to Waiouru project), aiming to give drivers safer, smoother journeys, and to keep our highways in good condition.
“We appreciate road users slowing down around our crews, who work long days and nights through summer when other people are enjoying road trips.
“Specialist sealing crews will generally move sequentially along a stretch of highway, but it’s also highly likely one stretch of highway could have several different specialist crews working at the same time. As a result people may strike more than one traffic management site on the same trip, especially on higher volume state highways," she says.
To plan ahead and see where disruptive works are, people can use the NZTA Journey Planner (journeys.nzta.govt.nz(external link)) This is kept up to date in real time so you can see all disruptive activity and potential hazards on the state highway network.
Waikato and Bay of Plenty state highway works as at 20 September 2024 [PDF, 335 KB]
