It’s a wrap! For this season
You’ll be as thrilled as we are that there are no more road closures on State Highway 1 (SH1) as part of the SH1 Tīrau to Waiouru Accelerated Maintenance Programme (T2W) for this season. Thank you for putting up with us!
Road maintenance is a messy but vital business made even more challenging when you have to close sections of New Zealand’s main arterial route, SH1. The amount of work and intensity of work on this project could not have been done under traditional stop/go traffic management within this time period. Using road closures, we’ve delivered works at a much faster pace, working across the full width of the road allowing the mass movement of roading material and increased work teams. This includes up to 145 truckloads of roading metal being delivered to the various sites daily.
We want to say a huge thank you to all the communities, businesses, freight, local councils, iwi and road users impacted by our works on SH1 this season. We have spent hundreds of hours considering and managing the detours we’ve sent you on, and even more hours working out how to minimise the disruption as best we can.
We appreciated being able to work closely with our freight partners, getting over 64 oversize loads through our sites, including many houses, and keeping an eye on all those bridges that heavy vehicles were detoured across. At Kinleith we also worked alongside a local forestry company to enable additional access for trucks to the Kinleith Mill via a private road, which smoothed the way for hundreds of truck journeys.
We facilitated access for residents and businesses through our sites as best we could and most of the time we got it right. All these logistics are behind the scenes but they’re part of our day-to-day job.
We've been called all sorts of names, and we’ve also received praise and constructive criticism. Through it all we have remained focused on delivering road users a better experience on the sections of SH1 we have worked on and a road that will last longer and cause less disruption in the future.
We are looking forward to the break before we are back to talk to you again ahead of next season. Because, yes, we are coming back next season to do the final surfacing in the areas we worked on and maintenance and rebuilding between Taupō and Tūrangi and in the Tīrau and Tokoroa townships.
Adding the final surface always comes up to 12 months after the initial chipseal surface is laid to ensure it has bedded in properly.
We’re still working on the programme for next season and will be coming to speak to freight, businesses and all our communities when we have the programme.
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