Brash pledges more roads to solve transport troubles

By BERNARD ORSMAN and HELEN TUNNAH

National Party leader Don Brash is promising to cover Auckland with more roads, saying the city doesn't have enough of them.

Dr Brash has unveiled his plans for fixing the transport woes of New Zealand's largest city by building more roads paid for by tolls.

"The fact of the matter is that highways generate growth. Not railway lines, not railway stations, not carriages, but roads. Modern transport runs on roads. Auckland doesn't have enough of them," Dr Brash said in a speech to the Auckland Chamber of Commerce.

His policy differs little from National's 2002 election programme and closely matches the wishlist of Auckland's pro-road business lobby.

Dr Brash has given an "absolute commitment" that National would complete Auckland's roading network within 10 years of coming to power.

To do this he will rewrite the Resource Management Act within nine months, set up a single transport body, possibly called Transport Auckland, to manage all of the region's transport needs and use electronic tolls and congestion pricing. Tolls would gradually replace petrol taxes and rates to fund transport.

He said tolls represented a small fraction of cost to a motorist in terms of delays and increased fuel use.

Dr Brash criticised legislative hurdles to the granting of consents for construction, blaming the Green Party for supporting the Government's Land Transport Management Act, which he said impeded road building by limiting private sector involvement.

"It should be feasible to reduce the time between making the decision to build a major road and starting the bulldozers to one year. But that won't happen without fundamental reform of the Resource Management Act and the Land Transport Management Act."

In Dr Brash's view, buses were a more flexible and cheaper alternative to rail.

National's plans were welcomed by business groups but panned by the Government and Greens co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons, who challenged Dr Brash to a debate to compare the Green vision of a "modern vibrant city with clean air and water" to National's idea of an "asphalt jungle choked with cars and smog".

Auckland Issues Minister Judith Tizard compared Dr Brash's promise to complete the city's roading network within 10 years to believing in fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Auckland City Mayor John Banks, who two weeks ago was extolling rail electrification for his pet eastern highway project, and whose council has unanimously endorsed a $1.5b rail upgrade, agreed that buses were a better investment than rail.