Why Northlanders should care about Auckland traffic jams

Traffic congestion on the Auckland Harbour Bridge.

If Northlanders care about four-laning from Whangarei to Auckland then we should care about our biggest city's commuter traffic woes as well.

Thousands of us visit Auckland for business or pleasure.

On Wednesday, some of my work colleagues and I travelled to Auckland for meetings. Our deadline was 9am.

We left Whangarei at 6am because we knew it would take about two hours to get to Albany, and we would hit traffic on the Northern Motorway. We stopped for 10 minutes on the way down.

We duly hit traffic at Albany and took about 45 minutes to travel 18km to our destination just off Victoria St West.

Twenty minutes earlier, we would have covered the distance in 15 minutes or so.

The traffic had begun to flow as we hit the approaching lanes to the harbour bridge, so we covered the last 5km in good time. But for 12km to 13km we moved in increments of metres, not kilometres.

Every week day, Aucklanders suffer this daily commute.

And not just week days - traffic seems to be increasingly clogged at weekends.

Or when there is a traffic "incident", such as the one on Sunday that slowed traffic all the way back to north of Warkworth, more than 40km down the motorway from Albany.

New figures suggest that Aucklanders can waste close to 80 hours a year stuck in traffic.

There were 40,000 more vehicles on the road in Auckland last year, than in 2016 - mainly because the population has grown by 121,000 in the past thee years.

The answer, according to Auckland's mayor, is better public transport, improved cycle networks and maximisation of existing networks.

So why should we care? Because any time that road improvements have shaved off the time it takes Northlanders to travel to Auckland has been lost.

If we do end up with four-laning between Northland and Auckland, hopefully it won't simply be delivering us faster into a correspondingly longer commuter hell.

Tomorrow I travel to Auckland for the third time this week, by road. I will be leaving half an hour early.