Kate Hawkesby: Forget the City of Sails, Auckland feels like the City of Cones

Some of you will be about to get back in it, I was in it yesterday and it was hell on earth. I’m talking about rush hour, I’m talking about the school run and in Auckland in particular - it was as hellish as they predicted it would be.  It feels like a long time between drinks. A long time since we’ve been back in cars, kids have been back in uniforms, bags have been back on shoulders and kids trudging back off to school. February is never an easy month anyway given the humidity and heat, especially if your uniform fabric is nice and thick and scratchy.  But the traffic, honest to God, I don’t know how it’s possible but it seems even worse. I left home for an eight minute journey, I returned 40 minutes later. It was chaos. Bumper to bumper madness.  And I know the zealots say hey get a bus, or get a train, or get out on your feet and walk but that’s not always practical or possible depending on where you live. So for us it was the car and we joined the throngs of everyone else doing the same thing.  And here’s my gripe this morning, because I know it’ll be happening again today and the next day – can they please, for the love of God, get rid of some of the cones?  I don’t mean the ones blocking actual hazards and surrounding actual road works. I mean all the extraneous ones just hanging around the streets like they’ve been forgotten about.  I drove past so many random nonsensical cones, just in the middle of the road, or to the side of the road, a handful or so of them, no idea what for – no road works in sight, no slips, no flooding, no nothing. Just cones. Why? Has someone forgotten about the cones? Who monitors and registers them all?  There are so so so many of them, thousands of them, and they’re being flung off trucks and slapped down on roads left right and centre these days, and I just wonder, is there some kind of spreadsheet or diary entry or managed data on where the all are and what for.  And whose checking to see they all get returned?  I’ve walked past some that have been in the same place for months, no work going on, just a coned off area for no apparent or obvious reason. Why? Who's in charge? Is there a cone manager?  And it’s not like these things are cheap - they’re between $25-35 each apparently. Add that up next time you drive past your rows and rows of cones.  I fully get that there are parts of the country in dire need of them, I get that there are works going on, and in parts of Auckland there are slips or damaged roads. But there are more cones it feels like than cars.   Forget the City of Sails, Auckland feels like the City of Cones.  As you sit in the morning commute this morning, and wrangle your way through traffic, trying to get to where you need to be, count them up, add up the cost of them, and tell me how many were actually necessary versus just cone mania for no apparent reason.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.