Another week , another disastrous poll for Labour

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And yes, had more sense been used about weight limits we might not now have such problems with roading - which illustrates clearly the inability or unwillingness of most politicians to take a long term view & give rather more thought to the future.

The issue we now have with failing road surfaces can be directly attributed to the increased tonnages allowed by the Key government, assumedly to please their transport industry aligned associates. They now are all too prepared to blame the 'state of the roads' on a lack of maintenance by the current (and previous ) government rather than accept responsibility for their poorly thought through legislative changes on maximum HGV weight limits, and the previous National government's throttling off on social infrastructure spending. A clear example of the sort of short term decisions we are likely to again suffer if the electorate can't decipher NAct's electioneering BS.

In regard to moving freight away from roads and onto our railway network this is something we saw happening first hand over the past year or two as many rail units of logs passed on the railway line that runs along our front boundary. This has reduced markedly over the past few months apparently because the increasingly competitive log industry found road transport cheaper than rail. The number of log trucks and huge piles of logs at Port Taranaki would tend to indicate that log volumes are still substantial, as does the dire state of SH3 both north and south of New Plymouth. Perhaps the coming RUC system rejig which will bring EVs and hybrids into that taxation system will also see rates increase for these HGV sufficient to tip the economics back in favour of rail carriage.