South Island councils are teaming up to form a single voice on transport planning over increasing concerns about missing out to the North Island.
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The Environment Canterbury initiative has attracted widespread support from local authorities and the New Zealand Transport Agency, who see merit in joining forces.
The main advantages included knowledge sharing and aligning the multiple transport strategies, transport committee chairs said.
It has proved to be a swansong project for Tasman District Council transport committee chair Trevor Norriss, who is stepping down at this year's election after 18 years in the role.
He said the Tasman district managed almost 1500km of local roads - half of which were unsealed - and a "huge" number of bridges, while 63 percent of its territory included non-rateable national park.
"We have a very big area, and a high number of scattered settlements with their own infrastructure needs."
Mr Norriss said top of the South Island councils - which included Nelson City and Marlborough District Councils - had proved the benefit of collaboration on transport by working together through their regional transport plans.
"To extend that to the whole of the South Island will be a huge advantage. That's about trying to align our regional transport plans, sharing knowledge and really giving a collective voice to the Mainland," Mr Norriss said.
He said there were cost savings in working together.
"If we don't do something to rectify that position, we will continue to miss out and that's based on traffic volumes and populations.
"Nowadays with the government policy statement leading things, any proposals for projects in the regions have to stack up against national projects, and that puts us on the back foot," Mr Norriss said.
He said Environment Canterbury realised there was a lot of knowledge spread throughout South Island councils over how to form regional transport plans but there had been a lack of coordination.
"It's harder for the smaller councils - we're a 'one-stop-shop' unitary authority, but for a lot it's a hard-ask without the resources. It will be better for smaller councils being able to tap into the knowledge, but for us in the top of the south, it will ensure that from one boundary to the next, things progressing in a coordinated way," Mr Norriss said.
Nelson City transport committee chair Ruth Copeland said the main thrust of an initial meeting was to see if collaboration was worthwhile.
"We agreed there were enough gains to be had to move to next step."
Mrs Copeland said it was essentially about better strategic planning.
"We do have bigger brothers and sisters in the Auckland region so it wouldn't hurt to collaborate a bit more, but it's essentially about identifying efficiencies on matters pertinent to our regions.
"There was is certainly merit in taking it further and we'll be looking at refining priority areas of collaboration," she said.
NZTA southern regional director Jim Harland said while they worked with a number of different entities, in the end it came down to there being one transport network for customers and having a bigger forum to take a South Island view was important.
Mr Harland said it will take a bigger forum to work through what is ahead in terms of investment needs in the freight network, including connections to ports, airports and the rail network.
He said critical issues facing the South Island will be the resilience of the transport network in the face of climatic changes and the effects of natural events, such as earthquakes.
The South Island councils will be meeting again in Christchurch on Monday.
