Photo: RNZ / Pretoria Gordon
The closure of the Desert Road is increasing freight costs $100,000 a day for consumers and businesses, according to an industry group.
State Highway 1 between Turangi and Waiouru shut mid January for major work - including the reconstruction of 45 kilometres of lanes and replacing the deck of a bridge.
It is expected to be closed for two months.
That means a detour through State Highway 41, 47, 4 and State Highway 49 - with some speed reductions in place. Waka Kotahi estimates the route is up to 40 minutes longer.
Ia ara Aotearoa Transporting New Zealand chief executive Dom Kalasih said it calculated the cost through NZTA data.
"There's about 4000 vehicles that use the Desert Road each day, right? About 23 percent of those vehicles are truck units. So that comes to about 800 vehicles a day.
"If you work on 800 vehicles a day and an extra 30 minutes, you've got 400 hours. Truck and trailers cost about $250 an hour to run."
"Four-hundred extra hours times $250 is $100,000 a day."
He said ultimately, consumers who paid for freight were the people who had to pick up the tab.
Tough economic times have meant members have found the cost hard to pass on because they were scared they would lose contracts, he said.
"There's always someone else willing to do it cheaper. We certainly tell all their members pass it on. Because it is not financially sustainable to keep wearing that cost."
The volume of freight could vary per trip, he said.
"But you know even if you talk say 20 tonne of freight on each of those trips. I mean that's a lot of freight charge."
Waka Kotahi said the road needed to be repaired.
Road workers cannot work in temperatures below 13C, so they have to work during the summer and they are also transporting steel girders and a concrete slab for the bridge.
But the industry group was supportive of NZTA repairing the road for two months, Kalasih said.
"It was sort of shorter term pain for longer term gain. You know, it could be done safer. It was actually have the least economic cost, because otherwise it was gonna go on for months and months or years of stop/go paddles.
"Quite often you can be sitting at a stop/go paddle for 10 to 15 minutes anyway, so closing it this way was the way to do it."
He said he did not have any reason to think there would be delays to re opening.
"But what we are saying to NZTA and we asked them on Monday this week was please keep us informed of how progress is going to schedule because the last thing we want is in the last week, they say 'oh, we're gonna have to extend the delays', because it means you know the transport operators have already hit the resource up for this additional travel and they need to change their plans accordingly."
He said he had seen photos of trucks with tar around the tyres.
"Apparently a whole lot of bitumen got accidentally spilled on the road. So today has been a bad day for traffic between Turangi National Park. But otherwise the route has been standing up."
