Street maintenance, including footpaths, along with cycleways, safety and bus services are all losers in a new plan for transport funding that will go before Auckland Council this month.
The plan has been drawn up by a joint working party of council and Auckland Transport (AT) officials. If it’s approved, preparatory work for “time-of-use” or congestion tolling and electrification of the ferries will also be put on hold.
The cuts will happen because the Government has sliced $564 million from the next three years of the Long-Term Plan (LTP) budget for transport in Auckland. The impact will be large and widespread, although if the council officials’ plan is adopted, as seems likely, it will not be as severe as cuts proposed last month by the Government.
This potentially puts the council on a collision course with the Government over how to spend transport funds and over who should decide.
“As an example,” Auckland Transport executive Murray Burt told councillors last week, “if we’d gone with what central Government was going to fund on street renewals, we would basically be replacing footpaths every 300 years.”
Under the officials’ plan, street maintenance and renewals will lose $107m over three years. But because this is the largest single item in the local transport budget, those cuts amount to only 8% of the full maintenance allocation.
Time-of-use charging work will be cut by 77% and road safety by 36%. The road safety cuts will affect education work and projects to make the roads safer.
Cycleways will lose about $90m, or 35% of their funding.
This will not affect cycling projects already under way, like the Pt Chevalier to Westmere connection, but it means more than half the money committed to cycling projects not yet started will disappear.
Electrification of ferries will have $89m deferred and buses will get $59m less, both part of a three-year cut to spending on public transport of $213m.
Local transport is funded roughly 50:50 by the Government and the council, with a three-year budget of almost $4.5 billion. This money goes to local roads, bus and ferry services and a range of other items, but excludes motorways, other state highways and railways, which are fully funded by the Government and are largely unaffected by this round of cuts.
The Government’s new commitments are in the three-year National Land Transport Plan (NLTP) released last month by Transport Minister Simeon Brown.
The council’s working group has responded with a full review of AT’s budget, rather than simply accepting the Government’s view of what should be cut.
This aligns with Mayor Wayne Brown’s view that it is the Government’s job to provide the money and the council’s job to decide how it is spent.
The new plan was presented to a workshop of councillors last week.
It outlined six options. Option 1 was for the council to take its cue from the Government and match it with a half-billion cut in its own transport spending.
At the other end of the range, option 4c was to spread the Government reduction widely over many parts of the budget, with the council confirming its own budget commitment in full. This would lead to the cuts outlined above.
The council’s financial strategy manager Michael Burns advised councillors that option 1 might reduce rates by 0.5% per year or, if it was used to pay down debt, might reduce operational spending after four years by about $50m a year.
Option 1 would also cut the funding completely for many more projects, including the sealing of gravel roads, new dynamic lanes, time-of-use charging, some new bus infrastructure and a new ferry terminal at Pine Harbour.
Funding for cycleways, except projects already under way, would almost entirely disappear. So would nearly all the money for road safety, footpaths and other community improvements.
The mayor favours option 4. Brown told the workshop: “I want a very strong focus on value for money. The most important thing is low-cost, high-impact options.”
This includes dynamic lanes, already in use on several Auckland roads, with more planned, and “digitally linked” traffic lights that give priority to buses.
“It’s time to brain the system up,” said Brown, “and that’s a lot cheaper than roads and other things.”
Option 4c doesn’t require new money, but reallocates the funding already approved in the council budgets for this year and for the 10-year period just begun.
“The good part,” Brown added, “is that anything we cut, it’s the result of the Government’s actions, not ours, so we can blame them. Which we will do.
“There are no good options,” said council strategy manager Robert Simpson. But he and the other officials recommended 4c and this appeared to find most favour with councillors.
But there were some strong reservations.
Shane Henderson said he was “sick of reports with no regard to climate impacts”. Julie Fairey agreed.
Murray Burt from AT said the modelling hadn’t been done but they “have a manager working on it now”.
Angela Dalton criticised the plan for not making it clear that road safety funding cuts would increase deaths and serious injuries.
“We all know that AT has the data showing this,” Dalton said.
Chris Darby agreed. “It’s important for Aucklanders to understand: how many of us are less likely to make it home? Let’s find out how many people are more likely to be killed or seriously maimed on our watch.”
Richard Hills noted that the original road safety budget involved a “$70-odd million contribution from the Government, but we got $6 million.”
Hills, Fairey and Darby also wondered why the budget for sealing gravel roads had not been touched, while cycling was facing big cuts.
Simpson responded, “This is not a great outcome for cycling and nor will it be for emissions either.”
Maurice Williamson took a different tack. He suggested they were “not in a position to say” if AT was the “best place to put that money” and he thought none of the options should be ruled out.
All the options, with 4c recommended, will now go to a full meeting of the governing body of council on October 24. A vote will be taken at that meeting.
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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