George Wills has spent 15 years working in traveller information and road network communication across New Zealand. From helping the public navigate hundreds of simultaneous road closures during the Christchurch rebuild, to developing the digital tools that kept communities informed through the Kaikoura corridor recovery, through to running NZTA’s national journey planner system, he’s seen the relationship between roadwork communication and public trust from every angle.
Nobody likes roadworks. That’s not a controversial statement. But after 15 years of working on how we communicate road disruption to the public, I’ve come to believe that most complaints about roadworks aren’t really about the roadworks themselves.
When you analyse the complaints and talk to people face to face about what frustrates them the themes are pretty straight forward. It’s being surprised by a closure they didn’t know about. It’s seeing the same road dug up three times in two months and wondering why nobody coordinated that. It’s not knowing when the work will finish, or whether the dates they were given are still accurate. It’s the feeling that nobody planned this properly.
As for the work itself? Most people accept that roads need maintenance, pipes need replacing, and new infrastructure gets built. What they don’t accept is being left in the dark about it.
That distinction matters because it points directly to things authorities can actually fix.
Before getting into what can be improved, it’s worth being honest about the constraints. Pretending that ALL disruption is avoidable would undermine any credibility on the stuff that actually is.
Utility companies have a statutory right to access the road corridor for maintenance and upgrades. Council infrastructure ages and needs renewal. Growth means new subdivisions, new connections, new capacity.
Weather delays work and creates havoc with project schedules. There are always unknowns around what lies beneath the ground. Emergency repairs typically can’t wait for a coordination meeting 'next week'.
I saw this at its most extreme during the Christchurch rebuild. After the 2011 earthquake, over 1,000 kilometres of roads needed rebuilding along with hundreds of kilometres of damaged underground pipes. The SCIRT alliance had multiple delivery teams working simultaneously across the city for years. The volume of concurrent roadworks was unlike anything New Zealand had seen. Some level of disruption was simply unavoidable. You can’t rebuild a city’s infrastructure without getting in people’s way.
The same was true after the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake. When over 200 sites along SH1 were damaged and the corridor between Picton and Christchurch was severed, restoration work had to happen fast. Design and construction ran simultaneously. The priority was getting communities reconnected, and that meant living with significant disruption along the way.
These are extreme examples, but the underlying truth applies everywhere. Some disruption is real and unavoidable, and the public generally understands that when it’s explained honestly.
While the existence of roadworks may be unavoidable, the way they’re communicated and coordinated is entirely within an authority’s control. And that’s where most complaints actually originate.
Authorities can control whether the public knows about planned work before it starts. They can control whether multiple works on the same corridor are coordinated or left to clash. They can control whether there’s a single, reliable place for people to find out what’s happening on the network. And they can control whether communities get timely updates when plans change.
During the Christchurch rebuild, one of the things I worked on was helping the public navigate the constantly shifting landscape of road closures across the city. What became very clear was that people’s tolerance for disruption was directly linked to how well they understood what was happening. When people could see what work was planned, why it mattered, and roughly how long it would take, they adjusted. They found alternative routes. They planned around it. Complaints dropped noticeably when the information was good, even when the disruption itself was significant.
Conversely, when information was poor or absent, even relatively minor works generated outsized frustration. The complaint was never really "why are you digging up my street?" It was "why didn’t anyone tell me?"
One of the fastest ways to erode public trust is for the same stretch of road to be dug up multiple times in quick succession. Power company finishes, road gets resurfaced, then a water main replacement starts two weeks later. To the person living on that street, it looks like nobody is talking to each other. And quite often, nobody was.
This is a coordination failure, not a communication one, but it drives more public frustration than almost anything else. Complaint data has shown that concerns about worksite management and traffic disruption are consistently the most common categories reported by the public. The AA has noted that the perception of works signs being up with no apparent activity, or a sense that works are happening all at once along key routes, are among the most frequent frustrations raised by their members.
The fix for this is straightforward in principle but hard to achieve without the right tools. When every authority, utility company, and contractor working in a corridor can see what else is planned for that same stretch of road, coordination becomes possible. When an applicant submits their plans and the system automatically flags that there’s already approved work scheduled on the same corridor next month, a conversation happens. Maybe the works get combined. Maybe they’re sequenced so the road only gets closed once. Either way, the public sees competence rather than chaos.
One of the most effective things an authority can do is give the public a live, accurate view of what’s happening on the road network. Not a PDF of planned closures updated fortnightly. Not a media release about major projects. A map that shows current and upcoming works, updated as things change.
This shifts the entire dynamic between an authority and its community. Instead of a complaint-driven model where people ring the council when they hit unexpected roadworks, you get an information-driven model where people check the map before they travel. That’s a fundamentally different relationship.
I spent several years running NZTA’s national journey planner, which aggregates road event information from across the country and presents it to the travelling public. The lesson from that experience was clear: people will use good information if you make it easy to find. The key word is easy. If the information lives on a separate website that nobody knows about, or requires navigating three menus to reach, it doesn’t matter how accurate it is.
That’s why embeddable maps matter. When a council can take the live roadworks map and embed it directly on their own website, the information sits where people already go. It’s not another portal to remember. It’s not a third-party app to download. It’s right there on the council’s transport or roads page, showing what’s happening and what’s coming up.
Cambridgeshire County Council in the UK reported that their public roadworks map received over 227,000 interactions in a single year, with a corresponding reduction in phone calls and emails from the public about roadworks. That’s the pattern. Give people good self-service information and they use it. The enquiries that do come through tend to be more specific and productive, rather than "what’s going on with my road?"
Christchurch City Council went a step further and have integrated their roadworks data into their call centre CRM so that when people phone the council to complain or enquire, call centre staff are able to provide relevant information in real-time over the phone. This reduces further downstream workload for council staff in responding to tickets but more importantly gives the public confidence that the council has a clear view of what roadworks are happening in real-time.
A public roadworks map is a good start, but it still requires people to actively check it. The next step is proactive notification: letting people subscribe to updates about work in their area or on their regular routes, so the information comes to them.
This was something we learned the hard way during the Kaikoura recovery. With the SH1 corridor between Christchurch and Picton operating on restricted hours and subject to closures at short notice, travellers needed to know the current state of the road before setting out. We developed tools to push that information out proactively rather than waiting for people to go looking for it. The difference in public sentiment was significant. People who knew what to expect were patient. People who were caught unaware were furious, even if the delay was the same.
The same principle applies to everyday roadworks. When a resident can sign up to be notified about upcoming work on their street, or a regular commuter gets an alert about planned closures on their route, the authority stops being the organisation that surprises people with roadworks and starts being the organisation that keeps people informed. That’s a meaningful shift in how the community perceives the authority’s competence.
A roadworks map on the council website is one channel. But people plan their journeys in all sorts of ways. They check Google Maps. They use navigation apps. They listen to traffic reports. They check the NZTA journey planner.
The most effective approach is to make roadwork data available to all of these channels through an API that pushes information to services like Google Maps and NZTA’s journey planning system. When a closure or detour is recorded in the permit system, it can flow automatically through to the platforms that millions of people use every day. The authority doesn’t have to maintain separate data feeds or manually update multiple systems. The information is entered once and distributed everywhere.
This is something I’m particularly passionate about, having spent years on the receiving end of that data at NZTA. The quality of the traveller information a journey planner can provide is only as good as the source data it receives. When roadwork information is timely, accurate, and machine-readable, it reaches people through whatever app or platform they prefer. When it’s stale, incomplete, or locked in a PDF, it doesn’t reach anyone.
None of this is about doing less work on the road network. Infrastructure maintenance, utility upgrades, and new builds are going to keep happening. The question is whether the public experiences that work as planned and well-communicated, or as chaotic and surprising.
Having worked on both sides of this problem, from building the tools that communicate disruption to running the national systems that consume that data and present it to travellers, I keep coming back to the same conclusion. The authorities that communicate well don’t get fewer roadworks. They get fewer complaints. And they build more trust with their communities in the process.
myWorksites supports this through its public roadworks map, which can be embedded directly on any council or authority website. It also provides an API that feeds roadwork data to services like Google Maps and NZTA’s journey planner, which in turn provide route-based notifications for the public. The information your team already captures through the permitting and coordination process becomes the source of truth for public communication, without anyone having to maintain a separate system.
If your authority is fielding complaints about roadworks and the root cause is communication rather than the work itself, that’s a solvable problem. The tools exist. The data is already being captured. It just needs to reach the people who need it.