Major road closures around the country are causing a headache for truck drivers, with some trips taking 12 hours.
In the wake of Cyclone Gabrielle, it's estimated around 400km of roads are closed, while several bridges have been washed away.
Transporting NZ's Nick Leggett told Breakfast the closures are "hitting every part of New Zealand".
"You've got men and women who perhaps would've taken half a day to do a trip and are now of course having to double that and it means often overnighting in places where they previously didn't have to and of course that adds massive stress but also costs to the movement of freight.
"Trucking mirrors the economy and it carries 93% of New Zealand's freights so when you slow everything down, you make it much harder and much more costly to actually keep the economy running."
Leggett said the recent weather events have shown that the country's infrastructure is not resilient, and is "pretty exposed" to a battering.
"Truck drivers have been saying for many years now that the roads are in very poor condition and actually the thing I've heard echoed from those men and women whose work days are spent on the roads is 'this is the worst we've ever seen it'."
He said it's due to 15 years of underinvestment in roading maintenance and no new, more resilient and safer roads being built.
Leggett said many communities around Aotearoa have been left exposed because they aren't as well connected as they should be.
He said given the recent weather events, the roading is only expected to get worse but it can be helped by building better infrastructure and weather and future proofing the roads.
"Roads are still the best way of connecting New Zealand, they're not just what freight travels on, their what people travel on.
"The thing with a road is we can have multiple ways of getting to a community, multiple ways of getting freight to where it needs to go and I think we can do a better job of improving the connectivity to different parts of New Zealand."
He said many people around the country are feeling the effects, with goods transported out of places like Hawke's Bay haltered.
"These are big food producing parts of the country, they're primary products not just for the domestic market but also for the export market and everything is under pressure."
PM responds
Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told Breakfast ensuring whole communities aren't cut off will be "a real area of focus for us".
"We know that the resilience of our transport networks needs to become one of the biggest priorities in the next little while as we rebuild, as we try and build back better, so that we don't have extreme weather events cutting off whole communities in the way that it has in the last couple of months."
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