More positive headlines this week with food and fibre exports hitting a record $65.2 billion for the year to June, up eight per cent and ahead of forecast. Dairy, meat and wool, horticulture. Our farmers and growers keep delivering, through a year of global disruption and rising input costs.

Almost every one of those dollars travels by truck at some point between farm gate and port. Record exports depend on a road network that is open when it needs to be.

Overseas tourists, our second largest export earner, also travel by road. Stats NZ data out on Wednesday shows the total number of overseas visitor arrivals are now back to within a whisker of pre-pandemic highs. 

What gets measured gets managed.

This week I had the pleasure of meeting Bill Dabbs, who has come up with a smart way to measure our roading network’s resilience. Working with the Logistics Institute of New Zealand, Bill has developed a new practitioner’s guide to state highway resilience. Built on 10 years of NZTA closure data, it assessed 50 state highways and gave them a resilience score, using consistent measures such as availability (the share of days a highway is fully open) and the average time between unplanned closures. The same method can be applied to local roads. Those of you moving freight already know the network’s weak points from experience. Now there is evidence to back up the conversation.

The findings are sobering. Thirty-six of the 50 state highways and spurs assessed, 72 per cent, show declining resilience over the decade. Some of this can be attributed to the increased frequency of severe weather events the network is now having to face. But not all. The Infrastructure Commission’s National Infrastructure Plan tells us renewal spending on state highways averaged only 37 per cent of depreciation between 2012 and 2022. We have not been looking after what we’ve got.

This is a serious problem, and a solvable one.