Transport Minister Phil Twyford announces the priority for land transport will be investment in local roads and rapid transport. It is hoped to prevent 160 deaths and serious injuries per year.

The head of one of the country's largest logistics companies says the Government's focus on rail services for freight is long overdue.

Don Braid, chief executive of Mainfreight, is a big believer in getting freight off roads and onto rail for much of its journey.

He's welcomed a policy shift towards rail from Transport Minister Phil Twyford, even though the proposed fuel tax hike could cost his company a lot of money.

Supplied KiwiRail are keen to get logs off the road and onto rails.

Twyford's draft Government Policy Statement on transport (GPS) puts millions more into rail while trimming back on costly state highway improvements. Roads still account for the overwhelming majority of the funding pie, with increases to regional and local roads along with state highway maintenance - just not improvements.

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That rail funding is earmarked for passenger rail services and urban transit however, while a wider "rail review" is taking place.

Supplied Mainfreight's Don Braid is keen to get freight onto train tracks as much as possible.

KiwiRail - the state owned enterprise who own the rail system - is generally funded from the wider government funding pool, not the National Land Transport Fund the GPS controls, which comes from fuel excise taxes.

This seems set to change in future however, with one line noting that "the scope of the GPS is likely to expand to include aspects of rail freight and coastal shipping. "

Braid says this general shift towards rail is welcome.

LEILANI HATCH/STUFF Rail currently carries just under a third of our exports to port. The Government wants to increase that.

"The Government understands that rail is a necessity and that it can be second corridor to take the load off the roading infrastructure," Braid said.

"That's not just for freight but for passengers as well. They are taking steps in that direction."

The idea is that rail can and should take on a lot of the long journeys from trucks, thus stopping them filling up and damaging roads. So even if a car driver is paying for railways to improve, they are paying for roads to be improved at the same time.

Trucks wouldn't be gone completely - Braid is clear that the "last mile" is never going to be filled by rail - but much of the load can be taken off.

Twyford is adamant that Kiwis already understand and support this argument, although the visceral backlash in some quarters to the idea of petrol excise taxes being used for rail may suggest otherwise.

Mainfreight use rail for about $40m of business a year, but there are several blackspots in the country where rail services no longer reach, such as the Bay of Plenty and West Coast of the South Island. KiwiRail itself says it moves about 17 million tonnes, or 30 per cent of New Zealand's exports.

Braid said the previous Government was "anti-rail" to an almost ideological degree. He was a fan of the flagship Waterview Tunnell but said it was "not enough" - that investment was needed into more than just roads, and it needed to be thought about in terms of decades, not years.

"It's not just about more roads. We have to think deeper than that. Yesterday I was in Brussels,and their ring road is six lanes. It was jam-packed. Stopped."

National are not completely blind to these arguments. Then-transport Minister Simon Bridges promised $267m for commuter rail in Auckland and Wellington during the election, with $100m of that helping to set up a dedicated freight line in Auckland. In 2010 the former government invested $750m over three years in an attempt to make KiwiRail financially self-sufficient over a decade.

National's new transport spokesman Jami-Lee Ross said he hoped Braid would look further into the Government's plans.

"Everything they are saying and everything they are putting in is gearing towards light rail and commuter rail and rapid transit. I've not seen anything that would improve freight journeys," Ross said.

"In fact the cuts to the state highway network funding would actually lead to a range of initiatives that would have improved travel time not going ahead."

He agreed that the transport network shouldn't rely exclusively on roads but argued the Government's changes would simply provide "trams down Dominion Road."

"It's all around moving people, not around moving goods."

The rail funding in the GPS does predominantly focus on commuter rail, pending a rail review, but some investment in KiwiRail has already begun with the Provincial Growth Fund.

In February Regional Economic Development Shane Jones announced the fund would help get the mothballed Wairoa-Napier line back online for freight trains.

"Moving logs by rail takes pressure off the roads, and reduces greenhouse gases. The Wairoa-Napier road is not designed to cope with the growing volumes of logs," KiwiRail Chief Executive Peter Reidy said.

"We have estimated that using the Wairoa-Napier line to move the logs could take up to 5714 trucks a year off the road, and reduce carbon emissions by 1292 tonnes."