It’s a tangerine headline-hogger with a big round bottom and not much on top.
Yes, that’s right – I’m talking about road cones. What did you think I meant?
Somehow yesterday’s mundane safety devices have become today’s incendiary clickbait, the source of headlines like: ‘War on cones’; ‘road cones causing road rage’; ‘rogue road cones ‘littering’ district’; ‘the row over road cones is getting piping hot’.
My favourite is The Spinoff’s from last Friday: ‘The life-changing power of blaming everything on road cones’.
Some suspect that a hatred of road cones masks a deep dislike of cycleways and the other advances hauling our cities into the 21st century. Others insist that the overuse of road cones is draining our coffers dry.
Who is right?
Let’s look at the putative costs of road cones – and the costs of not having road cones.
Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown says $145million road cone spend is ‘unjustifiable’ (Stuff, March 2023).
Auckland Council spends a reported $145 million a year on road cones and temporary traffic management. (NZ Herald, July 2024).
Many of us, thanks to stories like these, think that road cones have cost Auckland $145 million. But this isn’t true.
At a Beehive press conference earlier in the year, Spinoff’s political editor Joel MacManus watched as PM Chris Luxon was asked how much the government spent on road cones. “After checking his notes, Luxon confidently responded: $768 million. There was an involuntary reaction in the room – a burst of laughter at such an obviously ridiculous number.”
This was more than the yearly operating budget of the Department of Conservation: ($675 million in 2024/25). Was Luxon suggesting that we spend more on pointy tubes of polyvinyl chloride than on DOC?
Where did this figure come from?
MacManus soon found a November press release by former transport minister Simeon Brown claiming that NZTA Waka Kotahi contractors had spent $786million in three years on “road cones and temporary traffic management”.
(MacManus, dazed by the enormity of the figure, reported it as $768 million).
Eights and sixes might have danced before his eyes, but he was, as far as I know, the only journalist to call Brown out.
Congratulations if you have spotted it already. You’ve done better than the PM. There are three words people often miss when confronted with any sentence containing the phrase ‘road cones’. Those three words are ‘and traffic management’.
Temporary traffic management involves more than road cones. It includes signage, permit writing, and workers dressed in high-vis dealing with people shouting at them about road cones.
Saying that Auckland spends x amount a year on road cones and temporary traffic management is like saying that I spend $400 a week on marmalade and other groceries, or $4000 a year on post-it notes and rates.
Despite nine government announcements about road cones, the government has, so far, never revealed how much it spends on road cones alone.
Personally, I couldn’t care less about road cones. I’d like the politicians I pay for to worry about the health system crisis, the housing crisis, the energy crisis and the hungry children crisis instead.
In New Zealand we are terrible at keeping workers safe from injury, a tragedy missing from most stories about road cones. One person is killed at work every week on average. In 2023, the NZ Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum (BLHSF) reported that 73 people die per year, on average, in workplace accidents.
This is an astronomical number – 60 percent higher than Australia and 500 percent higher than the UK. Serious workplace injury is 35 percent higher than Australia and 330 percent higher than the UK.
With so many workers being killed, plastic cones on the road designed to keep cars, cyclists and road workers apart are not bad things. They are good things.
The government’s shift of resources from preventing deaths to monitoring orange cones feels, writes Max Rashbrooke, “like a grotesque joke, the sort of thing even satirists couldn’t invent”.
It doesn’t even make financial sense, he says. Even if you recycled a few road cones, lost productivity from workers killed or injured on the job amounts to at least $4.9bn, according to the BLHSF. Even if road cones cost as much as the Department of Conservation, getting rid of them wouldn’t dent this figure. It would increase it.
What would help our accident stats is by supporting Work Safe. In a superb Newsroom piece about impending ‘reforms’ to the agency, Rebecca Macfie reports that New Zealand has 31 percent fewer health and safety inspectors than Australia, which does a far better job of protecting workers’ lives.
The Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety, Brooke van Velden, “risks setting the scene for further tragedies by instructing Work Safe to go easy on businesses and by promoting the idea that workplaces are currently over-policed by a fearsome regulator focused on trivia,” writes Macfie. “This is a myth.”
Macfie should know, having written a multi-award-winning book on the Pike River Mine disaster – a preventable tragedy which killed 29 workers and led to the creation of Work Safe.
The coalition-government promised to be “laser focused” on the economy and productivity. Their performative obsession with road cones shows how hollow those words are.
• Jenny Nicholls
© Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2025
