Speech Notes

SAFETY AROUND ROADWORKS CAMPAIGN

Nick Miller – Chairman Roading New Zealand
February 17 2005

Good afternoon Ladies and Gentlemen.

Thank you all for coming to today’s launch of the Safety Around Roadworks Campaign. Your being here is endorsement for us that you share our very sincere concern for the serious problem of safety around roadworks.

Safety around road works has been an issue, which has concerned the industry for many, many years. And with the increased amount of works on New Zealand roads planned for the future, the situation is only going to get worse. So the launch of this campaign could not be more timely.

When we first started talking about this campaign many people thought that it was a campaign in which we wanted to create a safe environment for our staff, well obviously the safety of our staff is key to us and we consistently work really hard to ensure that they are protected. We have worked with Transit NZ to develop a Code of Practice for safety around worksites and agreed a system to make sure it’s applied in the field. This has become part of our Operate Safe system which accredits those contractors who are committed to health and safety and putting it into practice.

But this campaign has been developed because our people are worried about the many drivers and passengers who drive through road works completely oblivious of the risks they are taking when they ignore the signs.

And we realize that it’s a problem that is simply not going to go away unless we do something about it.

We have researched our own members and although there are no official statistics we found on speaking with our members that all of them had recognized that there was a problem and they were becoming increasingly worried. For example a number of our members will not carry out routine works on the motorway environment on Friday or Saturday night due to the increased risk.

It was completely untenable to them that during the process of making the roads safer for drivers and passengers some drivers and passengers were killed or seriously injured.

Also all too often roadworkers are put in the distressing, frustrating and unnecessary position of having to clean up after an accident at a roadworks site. And as you would appreciate this could be a particularly traumatic experience.

It is understandable that road works can be seen as a nuisance, especially to a driver in a hurry. And the result of this is that they see the speed restrictions as an imposition that does not apply to them. They think an unattended roadworks site is open slather. Maybe if they realised that speeding through a 30kph limit around a roadworks site at 80kph could result in automatic loss of licence they would be in less of a hurry.

Maybe if they had to comfort a grieving relative at the side of the road they’d slow down.

Roading New Zealand is delighted to lead this much-needed campaign. We are a relatively new organisation.

For those of you who don’t know us, Roading New Zealand is the industry representative body for a wide range of contracting companies whose core business involves building and maintaining New Zealand's roading and land transport infrastructure.

We are New Zealand's only specialist roading industry organisation.
Our members currently contract and/or build and maintain up to 90 percent of central government roading work and around 70 percent of local authority roading work. They also carry out the majority of New Zealand's civil contracting work, employ approximately 7,000 people and have a combined annual turnover of around NZ$1.4 billion.

Our Mission is to be the premier industry organisation promoting excellence and leading best practice in the provision of land transport infrastructure.

We are totally committed to safety for our members’ employees. Health and Safety is a priority for us all. Operate Safe is the proof of that.
We’ve worked hard to get this campaign underway and we are enormously grateful for the foresight of the New Zealand Road Safety Trust in putting up the funding to make it possible.

I’d also like to thank the many organisations who have endorsed the campaign including ACC, the LTSA, the Police, the AA, Transit New Zealand, Local government New Zealand and the Gough Group for supplying and arranging the machinery for the making the TV ads.

There are so many people who have worked co-operatively to ensure this campaign is successful that I cannot name them all here to day, but there is one special mention I would like to make and that is to Murray Brown from Works Infrastructure, and Roading New Zealand’s campaign manager. He along with Brent Waldron initiated the campaign and Murray has been the glue that has ensured that this campaign happened. A special thank you Murray.

As always in a speech there has to be a footnote and the footnote I would like to make is this, we at Roading New Zealand see this campaign as a partnership between the public and the industry.
We have taken on board the consistent feed back that we have received about road signs that have been left out where there appears to be no road works happening.

We recognize that we make mistakes too and we are working with our members to ensure that all signs that are out are relevant.

But we also know that a great percentage of the accidents around road works occur when there are no road workers there. And the signs have been left out because the road is still dangerous as it needs time to consolidate.

So it is important that we make sure that no signs are left out longer than they should be. And we are asking the public to help us to ensure this does not happen. We have set up a website which will go live next week called slowdown.co.nz and we would ask anyone who thinks a sign has been left out that should not be there to get on to the website and let us know where it is so we can check it out.

I know you will become our partners in helping to spread the important message to all motorists that is central to this campaign: Slow down around Roadworks; make it safe for roadworkers so they can make the roads safer for everyone. Thank you.