Juggernauts & April Fools?

   On April Fools Day the extra 5.6 cents a litre tax on fuel will be imposed to "fix the roads" God knows we need to spend more money on them. I suppose indirectly, we of the road will benefit a bit, but we aren't exactly holding our breath. The opinions at smoko are pretty unanimous. Most will go to get Aucklanders to work faster. There will be more & flashier bypasses, the traffic jams will be moved down the road a bit. Bugger all will be spent on improving surfaces and rebuilding dodgy sections of road which are relentlessly being hammered into goat tracks by the main culprits, Heavy Trucks, which are getting away scott free
    A week or two ago we were excavating at the end of a bridge approach on a fairly typical section of State Highway 3. The road consisted of 200mm of metal under the seal, built on a hard clay base. The bridge had a date of construction proudly cast into the concrete end; 1953. The road at that time would have been state of the art. A "heavy" truck would have weighed 10 tons all up, and probably would struggle to do 75 kmh. You would propably have to wait an hour after one went past to see another one. Today that same section of road has an endless procession of trucks of over 40 tons, and all travelling at or a bit over the speed limit. The guys that built that section of the road would never have dream't what it would be asked to do.
   We get on well with truckies, any tax increase in their sector puts freight rates up, and so raises the cost of your new frost free refrigerator, pork chops, or toilet paper. They already pay through the nose for Road User Charges. We know that. But they are hammering our roads to death. We either build roads that can handle them, or we rethink the exercise, and build a decent railway system.