GUEST EDITORIAL

At a recent Nelson Tasman Regional Transport Committee meeting, OneFortyOne’s GM Shaun Truelock reported that, for the next nine months, they’d be running 200 extra logging trucks a day to Port Nelson. Why? In a massive “loss minimisation effort” to max-out the finite window for marketing windthrown timber from Tasman’s monstrous July storms.

Truelock was alerting the committee to the trucking spike (around 50% more heavy trucks on Nelson’s already-challenged Rocks Road), and seeking cooperation to minimise disruption.

If you know Rocks Road, you’ll know it’s a key commuter route as well as a feeder to the port. It winds between the sea and unstable cliffs, and slows to a painful crawl morning and night.

And that got me wondering. How might we organise ourselves to smoothly handle left-outfield impacts like 50% more trucks? After all, we know climate change has worse storms ahead, and we also know eliminating peak-hour congestion could be a potential game-changer, saving time and money for every vehicle every rush-hour.

Even without the likes of congestion-charging, our civic leaders could ready their communities with, say, an ‘orange traffic alert’ system. “At these times we ask you to try extra hard to avoid driving in peak hours: travel off-peak or, better, share a ride, catch a bus, or hop on a bike.”

Of course that would work more smoothly if set up in advance: temporary schedules ready for extra buses; employees and employers sorted for flexible start times; and commuters knowing who to share a ride with.

Some will protest, but we’re overwhelmingly a good bunch of people who like to do our bit. And the Stockholm congestion charging I’ve described previously shows how opposition can evaporate when the benefits become clear.

A recent column by National Road Carriers’ Justin Tighe-Umbers discussed a similar outcome. In “Doing things differently,” he described T2W, the massive Tirau to Waiouru Accelerated Maintenance Project, involving the complete closure of sections of SH1. “Unpopular at first…” Tighe-Umbers commented, “public sentiment swung from 9% positive at the outset to 91% by reopening…” That’s massive, and contains a lesson for all of us about keeping an open mind.

By coincidence, a related scheme has just launched in the Nelson region. The “Swap One” initiative encourages commuters who drive to change how they commute one day per week. There’s an easy-to-use app, many of the region’s biggest employers are already on board, and there are supporting activities like “commute clinics” to find the easiest ways to swap, and great prizes (I love “the biggest loser” for the person who reduces their driving the most). Check out swapone.nz.

And get this: if every commuter swapped just one commute a week, congestion would vanish. Then, even with those 200 extra truck journeys, the whole system – cars, trucks, tradies, buses, and all – would flow better than ever, and with miles lower emissions.

What a fantastic win-win it would be if OneFortyOne sponsored prizes that got enough commuters Swapping One out of the Rocks Road peaks to counteract the heavy-truck spike! Definitely worth a thought.

Lindsay Wood, MNZM, is the founding director of climate strategy company Resilienz Ltd. He is a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to climate awareness and environmental sustainability. Lindsay is active in policy arenas, develops tools to support decarbonisation, and speaks, writes and broadcasts widely on climate issues.