It used to take us an easy hour and a half to get from home to Dunedin.
If traffic was light with no hold-ups we could get get there in a little more than an hour and a quarter.
That was then, now is a different and much more frustrating story.
I drove down to the city and back last week, the week before and the week before that, one trip down took an hour and three quarters, the other two trips took two hours. The trips back home were similarly slow.
The extra time the trips took was caused by road works and slow traffic when it wasn't safe to pass.
In two places there was no one working where the signs said the road works were, just signs dropping the speed limit to 30 kph and interminable lines of orange cones.
Coming home from the last trip, I was the first at the stop sign and waited 20 minutes before it was turned to go.
There had been no traffic going south while I was waiting and the queue of vehicles driving the other way from me once we were permitted to move was more than a kilometre long.
I didn't have an urgent appointment so the slow trips were frustrating but didn't cause me serious problems.
That wouldn't be the case for everyone and made me wonder: what is the cost of the slow roads we now travel?
How much is more time spent driving adding to the cost of goods and services and what is the cost of the loss of productivity because of that?
How much will it cost to fix and how long will that take?
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