If you run a traffic management company or manage its operations, the last two years have been noisy. Road cones became a national talking point, the spending got put under a spotlight, and the rules changed underneath you. It’s worth cutting through the headlines, because the shift that’s happened is real, it’s now in your contracts, and it rewards firms that plan well.
What actually got said
In November 2024 the then transport minister, Simeon Brown, revealed that NZTA had spent 786 million dollars on road cones and temporary traffic management over the previous three years. That figure is NZTA’s state highway maintenance and capital works only. It doesn’t include council spending on local roads, so it isn’t the whole country’s TTM bill, but it was big enough to land. Brown called the approach “out of control” and singled out “excessive use of road cones and temporary speed limit reductions”, especially controls left in place after the work was done.
The numbers behind it: in the year before the reveal, TTM ran at 15.9 percent of maintenance costs and 6.1 percent of capital project costs. By the first quarter of the following year those had dropped to 9.9 percent and 3.1 percent. A February 2024 review of 800 state highway maintenance sites found most were unattended at the time, and judged that 145 of them had unnecessary traffic management in place.
By mid-2026 the policy had teeth. As of 1 July 2026, all new contracts must use the New Zealand Guide to Temporary Traffic Management, with existing contracts to follow by 1 July 2027, and councils have to adopt the risk-based approach to keep their national land transport funding. The current minister, Chris Bishop, framed it as asking contractors to “assess the actual risks at each site and choose traffic management that’s appropriate for the job, rather than following a one-size-fits-all rulebook”, while adding that “safety will always come first”. NZTA’s reported TTM spend fell by around 46 million dollars in the last financial year.
What changed under the bonnet
The old code, CoPTTM, was prescriptive. It told you what controls to use based largely on road type and speed. The new guide, NZGTTM, is risk-based. It asks you to assess the actual risk at the actual site, then choose controls that match. Same goal, safe roads and safe workers, but the justification moves from “the code said so” to “here’s the risk, and here’s why these controls fit it”.
That’s the whole shift, and it’s the reason the cost conversation and the compliance conversation are really the same conversation.
The fear worth naming
Plenty of people in the industry heard “reduce road cones” and heard “cut safety, and carry the blame if it goes wrong”. That worry is fair, and it deserves a straight answer.
Risk-based doesn’t mean fewer controls as a target. It means the right controls for the risk. On a genuinely low-risk footpath job in a quiet street, that may well be less than a highway-grade setup. On a higher-risk site, it may be more. Your duties under the Health and Safety at Work Act haven’t changed, and neither has the need to keep people safe. What’s changed is that the plan now has to show its reasoning, and that reasoning is also your defence if a decision is ever questioned.
How better planning cuts cost without cutting corners
The saving, where there is one, comes from doing the planning well, not from doing less of it. A few mechanisms are worth being clear about:
Controls that match assessed risk mean you’re not putting motorway-grade traffic management around minor work. Fewer rejected plans mean fewer resubmissions and less lost time waiting on approvals. Good documentation means a lighter setup is defensible, because the risk assessment behind it stands up. Consistency between planners means the decisions are repeatable and reviewable, rather than resting on one experienced person. And planning tied to the actual work phases cuts the “cones left out after the job is finished” waste that drew the criticism in the first place.
None of that is a promise of a particular saving. What you save depends on your sites, how conservatively you operate today, and what your RCA asks for. The honest version is: risk-based planning, done properly, tends to right-size the job, and right-sizing is where the cost goes.
What to do about it
The deadlines are already here for new work and close for existing contracts. The practical moves are to get your planners comfortable writing a genuine risk assessment rather than reaching for a template, to make sure every control on a plan can be explained in a line, and to keep the records that back up a lighter setup so it survives a review. Firms that can show their controls match the risk will spend less time arguing with reviewers and less money on controls they didn’t need.
Where TrafficSense fits
This is the problem TrafficSense is built for. It helps you author NZGTTM plans that put the risk assessment first, keeps your documentation consistent from job to job, and records where every decision came from, so a right-sized plan has the reasoning attached when an RCA looks at it. A person still approves every plan. It won’t guarantee a number on your next invoice, but it makes the risk-based case easier to make, and easier to defend.
Where the official guidance lives
- New Zealand Guide to Temporary Traffic Management (NZGTTM). NZTA’s official guidance, and the source of truth.
- Managing work site traffic: good practice guidelines. WorkSafe New Zealand.