Experience
Our experience
Traffic engineering shouldn't be a detour on a development programme. Our team provides expert guidance from early concept through to final construction, so that traffic outcomes are designed in rather than worked around later. We focus equally on keeping traffic moving and on the safety of the communities our clients' projects land in.
Traffic management
We develop and review the documents and plans that allow work to happen on or near the road network.
Traffic guidance schemes
Traffic management plans and strategies
Traffic staging and event planning
Expert peer reviews
Road safety audits
Studies and design
On the planning and design side, we offer the analytical and design work needed to secure consent and to deliver projects that integrate with their surrounds.
Traffic impact assessments
Road safety audits at all project phases
Transport planning
Detailed engineering design
What this work involves
Traffic and transport work decides two things a development cannot easily change later: how vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians get in and out, and whether the network outside the boundary can absorb them. Both need answering before a layout is fixed, which is why we would rather be in the room at concept stage than reviewing a consent application that has already committed to an access point.
Our scope runs from transport planning and traffic impact assessment through to detailed design and the traffic management that lets construction happen on a live road. We prepare traffic guidance schemes and management plans, review them for others, run road safety audits at every project phase, and provide the analysis a council or road controlling authority needs to accept a proposal.
Traffic impact assessments and transport planning
Road safety audits at all project phases
Traffic guidance schemes and traffic management plans
Staging, event and construction traffic planning
Detailed engineering design of roads and intersections
Independent peer review and expert evidence
How we approach it
Safety and capacity are usually presented as a trade-off, and occasionally they are, but most of the time a scheme fails on both because the underlying assumptions were never tested. We prefer to state the demand assumptions up front, show what happens if they are wrong, and design for the case the client can live with. Because our traffic people sit alongside civil, structural and geotechnical teams, the answer that comes back accounts for what can actually be built on the site rather than what looks tidy in a plan view.
Common questions about traffic and transport engineering
When do I need a traffic impact assessment?
Whenever a proposal changes how vehicles, cyclists and pedestrians get in and out of a site, or adds enough movements that the network outside the boundary has to absorb them. Councils commonly require one with a resource consent application for a subdivision, a commercial development or a change of use.
It is worth commissioning at concept stage. Access points are one of the few things a development cannot easily change once the layout is fixed.
What is the difference between a traffic management plan and a traffic guidance scheme?
A traffic guidance scheme is the drawing: the layout of signs, cones, tapers and lanes that makes a worksite safe on a live road. A traffic management plan is the wider document around it, covering how the site will be managed, by whom, and under what conditions.
We prepare both, and we review them for other parties.
Do you carry out road safety audits?
Yes, at every project phase, from feasibility and design through to pre-opening and existing roads. We also provide independent peer review and expert evidence where a proposal is contested.
Are safety and capacity really a trade-off?
Occasionally, but far less often than the framing suggests. Most intersections that perform badly for safety are also performing badly for capacity, because the same conflict points cause both. The cases where the two genuinely conflict are worth identifying explicitly rather than assuming, and that is an analysis question.
Can you design the road itself, not just assess it?
Yes. Detailed engineering design of roads and intersections sits in the same team, with civil, geotechnical and structural alongside for pavements, ground conditions and structures. Asset-scale work is on the transport market page.
