Freight moving between regions may travel by road, rail, and ferry before reaching its destination. A daily commute might involve walking to a bus stop, catching a train and then walking to an office. What matters isn't just the condition of individual assets, but whether people and goods can complete the journeys they need to make.
Understanding those connections is becoming increasingly important as Aotearoa New Zealand faces growing demands on its transport system. Population growth, changing travel patterns, climate risks, and increasing expectations around resilience and reliable access to jobs, services, education and communities all need better information to support decision-making.
Until recently, that was easier said than done.
More than 70 transport controlling authorities were working from inconsistent, licensed and disconnected datasets that couldn't talk to each other. Councils, NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi, KiwiRail and other transport providers each held valuable information, but there was no shared language and no integrated view of the national transport system.
The Asset Management Data Standard Multimodal Network Model (AMDS) was developed to help address that challenge. Created through a partnership between NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi, WSP and transport organisations, the model brings together information on roads, rail, ferries, footpaths and cycleways into a single digital representation of the transport network.
At its heart, the model is designed to understand journeys rather than individual pieces of infrastructure. In practical terms, it provides a much clearer understanding of how people and goods move around the country. The model includes almost 150,000 kilometres of roads, over 37,000 kilometres of tracks and footpaths, and 5,000 kilometres of rail infrastructure.
What makes AMDS especially valuable is the shift it enables from thinking about individual assets to thinking about transport as a connected system. It provides a national-scale connected view of the transport network, helping decisionmakers better understand how roads, rail, ferries, footpaths and cycleways work together to support people, communities and the economy.
That system-wide perspective supports a much deeper understanding of how journeys are made and where vulnerabilities exist. For example, the impact of a bridge closure can be understood not just at the crossing itself, but in terms of disrupted freight movements, longer travel times and the communities affected.
The value of that connected view was highlighted during Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023. Road closure information existed across multiple organisations but it took days for a national picture of the network to emerge, with a newspaper ultimately producing one of the first comprehensive national road closure maps. The challenge wasn’t a lack of data, but a lack of a shared, connected view of the transport system. AMDS helps address that gap.
The model provides a stronger foundation for investment decision-making. By bringing together information from across the transport system, organisations can better understand inter-regional dependencies, undertake national corridor analysis, and identify which routes are most important for moving people and freight.
Recent prototyping in the model has shown how it can support climate adaptation and investment planning by identifying vulnerable routes, assessing alternative connections, and highlighting communities at risk of isolation during flooding, landslides and coastal inundation events. This helps direct investment towards projects that improve resilience.
From an asset management perspective, this kind of network-wide visibility lets organisations make more informed decisions about risk, resilience and future investment while supporting greater collaboration across agencies. With a shared understanding of how the network functions, decisionmakers can move beyond managing individual assets and focus on the outcomes the transport system is intended to deliver.
Importantly, the AMDS Network Model is openly available through the NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi Open Data Portal under a CC BY 4.0 licence, making it free to access, use and reuse.
Ultimately, AMDS is more than a digital map. It's an example of how better data can support better decisions. By providing a connected view of the country's land transport network, it helps shift the conversation from managing individual assets to understanding the journeys, connections and communities those assets support.
