Trucks park at Murchison, which has become a major thoroughfare following the closure of the Picton to Christchurch leg of State HIghway 1.
OPINION: New Zealand is a coastal country with challenging geography and it seems logical that we should use the “blue highway” far more than we have done in the recent past.
Increasing our reliance on coastal shipping to move our freight, taking more trucks off our roads, is an essential step forward in building national resilience in the event of another natural disaster.
Public support for considering alternatives to long-haul trucking is building in the wake of the Kaikoura earthquake, in part because we have now seen first-hand how essential it is to have a good plan in place for our transport infrastructure.
Pacifica’s coastal ship Spirit of Canterbury offloads at Lyttelton late last year.
The blue highway is always there, it’s free, there are no potholes and no chance of slips. Yes, the weather can be challenging, but then the weather can be equally problematic for our roads.
Sea transport was a vital route between Auckland and Tauranga to Lyttelton following the closure of State Highway 1 and the rail corridor, and it remains so to some extent for what would have been rail freight.
Data from a NZ Transport Agency State Highway Traffic Monitoring System telemetry unit on SH1 at Waipara shows an initial increase in heavy traffic in the period following the earthquake has now plateaued so much so that truck volumes are only slightly up compared to a year ago. This would indicate that most of the rail freight, rather than being put on trucks, must be going via coastal shipping.
A number of freight forwarders have re-categorised what goods are being sent as just-in-time, or urgent freight, in order to reduce the amount that travels by truck.
Perishable goods such as fruit and vegetables will always be time critical, but there are many items that were only being classified as such for cash-flow reasons, and this is where the industry needs to look at the bigger picture.
Ships can carry more freight in fewer trips for less money, and little time is lost: A ship travelling from Auckland to Lyttelton does so in a similar amount of time as freight travelling by rail and ferry.
However, there are some challenges to overcome with regards to the current commercial model of the ports industry. One is that there is no financial incentive for operators to build more resilience and redundancy into their facilities. Where one operator might spend money on increasing resilience and struggle to make a return off that investment, another might not do this work and make more profit.
That approach does not benefit our country, and this is something that needs to be addressed.
Another issue is that while there is plenty of capacity to ship goods from north to south, this is not so in reverse. This is due to international lines being able to carry freight when continuing their journey and predominantly travel north to south.
As the Marlborough Chamber of Commerce has pointed out, it would make us less vulnerable if we spread our goods and distribution centres more equally rather than, in Marlborough’s case, mainly sourcing our perishable supermarket goods from Christchurch.
Another important benefit is that ships produce fewer emissions, and this is in line our obligations to reduce our emission by 2030 under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Relying on the sea, not just our roads, should be the way of the future.
It just makes a lot of sense.
Stuart Smith is the MP for Kaikoura
– The Marlborough Express