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Road Maintenance

Report a fault or issue:

Local roads - call us on 0800 734 834 (in district) or 07 862 8609

State Highways - call 0800 4 HIGHWAYS (0800 44 44 49)

For Life Saving Emergencies - ring 111 first

The local road network (almost 632km of urban and rural roads) is the responsibility of Hauraki District Council.

Road maintenance can involve:

  • fixing potholes,
  • vegetation control on rural roads,
  • road sweeping,
  • metaling rural roads,
  • upgrading road signs,
  • markings,
  • resealing, and
  • road widening projects.

Some road maintenance is planned and budgeted for over a period of time and some work is unscheduled due to things like weather events or accidents.

Check our Planned Works Schedule to see if you road is due any resealing work this rating year.

  • Planned works schedule - road resealing table below
  • Road Alerts

Reporting a fault on a local road

Council is responsible for building and maintaining the network of local urban and rural roads.

  • Phone us 24/7 on 0800 734 834 (in district) or 07 862 8609 to report it a fault or obstruction on a local road
  • While our staff may be aware of the location and issue, at times cracks, bumps and potholes can appear quickly over a few days so we need to hear about any issues as drivers come across them.
  • Please drive to the conditions, be vigilant and report any URGENT issues to us 24/7.
  • For non-urgent service requests, you can also message us on Facebook or complete a service request online.

State Highways (SHWY 2; SHWY 25 and SHWY 26) are owned and maintained by Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency.

Report an Issue

To report a fault or obstruction on a State Highway phone 0800 4 HIGHWAYS (0800 44 44 49).

Travel Conditions

To check travel conditions such as delays, road works and road closures on State Highways go to Waka Kotahi Plan Your Journey

Maps of State Highways in our Urban Areas

State Highways 2, 25 and 26 all run through parts of our town centres, which can make it confusing to know what is a local road (council's responsibility), and what is a State Highway road (Waka Kotahi's responsibility).

State highways have road names when they enter into our town centres:

Ngatea

State Highway 2 is also known as Orchard West Road

Paeroa

State Highway 2 is also known as Puke Road, Belmont Road and Normanby Road

State Highway 26 is also known as Te Aroha Road, Arney Street and Thames Road

Waihi

State Highway 2 is also known as Parry Palm Avenue, Rosemont Road and Tauranga Road

State Highway 25 is also known as Kenny Street (from the intersection of Rosemont Road and Kenny Street)

These stretches of road are maintained and managed by Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency.

Check for State Highway road closures

Save the link below to your favourites for the quickest way to stay up to date with any road closures or delays on a state highway.

Traffic map (nzta.govt.nz)

Our resealing programme takes care of defects in the existing road surface and reduces the rate of further deterioration, making sure our roads remain safe and able to cope with the amount of traffic using them.

Road resealing is carried out every summer as part of a planned road maintenance programme. Priority is given to roads with surface cracking, potholes and other issues which could pose a risk to road users.

Summer is a busy time

Summer is a busy construction season on the roads for both local councils and Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency, who maintain the state highways. Please take extra care around road workers and work sites and stick to the posted temporary speed limits to allow seals to settle well. Reducing speed also helps reduce the movement of loose chips while they embed into the new seal.

Our contractors plan to do most of the work in November and December, weather dependent. Along with Waka Kotahi, roadworks will cease from 12 noon on Friday 22 December to 8am Monday 8 January 2024, to minimise disruption to peak holiday traffic.

Local road resealing programme

The road resealing programme for 2024/25 will be added when the new list is available.

In Hauraki, a large proportion (44%, about 230km) of the Hauraki District Council (HDC) road network lies on soft, moisture sensitive organic (peat) and gley soils. These are mostly on the Hauraki Plains.

These soils are difficult for road construction due to low load bearing strength and are typically unsuitable for building roads using traditional design principles.

As well as the issues with load bearing strength, organic and gley soils are also moisture sensitive, making them prone to movement when the soil’s moisture levels change. For example, shrinking in dry weather.

This shrinkage can cause road surfaces to settle unevenly, creating bumps, cracks, and ruts in the road.

This is a common issue around the Waikato region and is more pronounced following dryer than usual summer and autumn seasons.

Because issues are primarily caused by environmental factors (as opposed to load related), such as the underlying soils’ load bearing strength, movement with seasonal wetting and drying, and recent ‘shock events’ such as the 2020 drought causing widespread pavement (road surface) distress, it is difficult to achieve a traditional design life of 25-30 years for these roads.

*INTERESTING FACT - Almost half of all peatlands in New Zealand are located in the Waikato region. These peatlands have taken over 18,000 years to form and can be tens of metres deep.

Map showing location of gley and organic soils

What we're doing about it

Peat and gley soil layers on the Hauraki Plains are very deep and cover a wide area, making it uneconomical to excavate and replace them with more suitable road foundation materials or improved pavement layers. We manage the situation by budgeting to reshape the surface of peat & gley roads every 5-20 years, but exceptionally dry years mean more repair work.

It is no simple task catching up on ‘shock event’ repairs - we expect the 2020 drought repair programme will be completed over three years – in addition to our ‘business as usual’ pavement repair programmes.

It appears that weather patterns are changing, with more frequent drought events experienced in the Hauraki in recent years as evidence of this.

As part of our response to the 2020 drought, we are researching road embankment configuration (layout) and materials. This has involved collecting materials from a number of sites across the Hauraki Plains so they could be laboratory tested. This will give us further understanding of the soils properties and triggers to road pavement distress, helping us to tailor treatment types and strategies moving forward.

  • The drought didn’t affect roads outside of the Hauraki Plains as markedly, as they are on different soils.
  • Some roads will require full width repairs in places, and others are half width. Overall it equates to about 10 km of road length.

What will it cost to fix the damage?

About $2.8M. Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency will pay for most of the work through their Emergency Works programme, and the balance will be funded by Council across the 2020/21 - 2023/24 financial years.

Gley soils - what are they?

Gley soils are poorly or very poorly-drained in their natural state. Saturation occurs during prolonged periods, oxygen becomes limited, and reducing conditions occur.

They are essentially older wet mineral soils derived from a variety of parent materials including alluvium, colluvium and wind-blown coastal sands. They occur in valley floors, on the upper part of coastal terraces and coastal and river back swamps or former back swamps.

References

  1. Waikato Regional Council - Managing Peat. Sourced 8 July 2021
  2. Description of gley soils sourced from Bay of Plenty Regional Council Enviro Report. Sourced 19 May 2021

How peat and gley soils react in a drought

The result of soil shrinkage is more easily observed during drought conditions – this is because these ‘shock events’ amplify pavement distresses in a short timeframe.

The double whammy of the extreme drought of 2019/2020 and the delays to our usual maintenance work due to Covid-19, means that some of our roads on the Plains are still showing signs of cracking, slumping, rutting and settling, from when the underlying soils dried out and contracted.

Watch out for roadworks

Council staff and contractors are monitoring roads and intervening where required to erect warning signs and temporary speed restrictions and/or to smooth the surface with asphalt when needed.

The impacts of extreme dry weather events (drought) means our contractors are working through a reseal and repair programme that is larger than their usual workload.

We have had to prioritise work and resort to temporary fixes in some instances until we can tackle them again in the summer construction season.

We don’t generally like to build roads in the wetter winter months and like to delay repairs where possible to allow soils to return to ‘normal’ moisture levels. However, we also decided not to leave failures too long as water ingress from rain can cause the roads to fail too so the pavement failures that presented a safety risk have been repaired.

Drivers will see signs and speed restrictions in place on many of our roads already so please be aware of road crews out and about, slow down for the temporary speed limits in place and drive to the conditions.

Repair failure – drought or workmanship?

When the repairs fail, we have to establish if this is due to the underlying environmental conditions or workmanship. If we establish that it is workmanship, this is reworked at the contractor’s expense.

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