I'd never really given it much thought at all, but coincidentally in 2 months i'd been to the maritime museum in Auckland which has models of all sorts of coastal ships that used to ply their trade around New Zealand which made me interested in the subject.

Then I read a post somewhere talking about how changes had been made around the late 80s early 90s designed to crush NZs maritime union power that would supposedly have replaced our coastal shipping effort with international carriers bringing their large container ships down here and then doing pickups & dropoffs as they bounced around the various ports. Apparently that never really happened, or at least didn't take off much so the net result was that we killed most of our coastal shipping and were left with road and rail.

In & of itself, road and rail probably seem like a good option because we had ferries linking both networks and around the time those changes had been made was a lot closer to the heydey of NZ Rail. Of course in hindsight we can see that the neo-liberal reforms that sold off the railways led to massive under-investment in the rail network, lines closing, being unmaintained, worsening rolling stock and in the end we went from 3 modes of freight transport to 1.

But what really made me think again about coastal shipping was the impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle and the likelihood that they will happen again, sooner than we thought 20-30 years ago, and more often thereafter. Gabrielle (briefly) entirely cut off the northern half of Hawke's Bay over land in all directions, North, West & South. Even when things were opened it was initially via a single road route to the south and took a long time to open the crucial Napier-Taupo link and even longer the Napier-Gisborne.

Smaller settlements around Tairāwhiti were cut off even worse as their roads & bridges between each other meant towns were isolated from each other as well. In the end because the road between Napier & Wairoa was so damaged a temporary shipping link was made from Gisborne port to Napier port.

So long as port facilities survive then the most resilient transport for freight & aid for coastal provinces after a cyclone will be coastal shipping. If we have a thriving network then its possible we don't notice the impact anywhere near as much as we might.