Transport policy Q&A: Jeanette Fitzsimons

Green co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons. Picture / Richard Robinson

The Herald invited politicians to answer questions at a range of policy forums - today's focus is on transport, a major concern for many Herald readers, especially in Auckland.

Below are edited highlights of the 45-minute question and answer session with Greens spokeswoman Jeanette Fitzsimons.

What marks out the Greens' transport policy as different?

Our policy is driven by the recognition that transport contributes 43 per cent of our climate-changing carbon dioxide emissions - the fastest rising of greenhouse emissions.

It is also based on the fact that a number of very experienced and independent commentators say that we are nearly at the end of cheap oil and that oil prices are going to keep rising as production slows and as we try to tap more and more difficult and expensive forms of transport fuel.

That all suggests that we have got to use transport fuel a lot more economically than we are now.

In a city like Auckland particularly, where we've relied for 50 years on just the road option, it hasn't worked. We have spent over 90 per cent of all transport funding on roads and motorways and we're more congested than ever. Even finishing the motorway system ... is actually only going to make congestion worse than it is now by everybody's estimates.

So we need to move away from single occupant vehicles. We need to fix up and improve our rail system for freight nationwide and for commuter passenger service in the major cities. We need to improve public transport. We need to develop better and safer facilities for walking and cycling.

Tell us more about what you would do for public transport?

You have to concentrate on completing the core of the public transport system in Auckland, which is the rail commuter system.

That means double tracking the whole system, electrifying and upgrading the signalling. It means a tunnel from Britomart under the CBD with a couple of stops in the CBD through to the Western line because the Britomart dead end is limiting the capacity of the entire rail system. Currently the rail system in Auckland can at capacity carry 4 million passenger trips a year. We can get it up to 50 million.

It gets up to 38 million with the ones I've mentioned. It goes up to 50 million with the link to the airport, the link round to Panmure and a rail track up the SH20 corridor.

We would fund that from diverting a little bit of the funding that's now planned for new motorways into the rail system because rail is enormously more cost-effective to build than motorways.

Asked about how rail would help Aucklanders trying to get to work, Helen Clark once replied that most Aucklanders don't live within cooee of a railway station. Won't most people be living too far from the rail lines to make a difference to their commuting?

If you're some distance out, rail gives you a fast and convenient main trip. But we have to make the connections with the rail a lot easier. When I was in Auckland, living in Meadowbank, I was 2-3km from the railway station. I used to bike across to the railway station, stick my bike in the guard's van, travel in on an 8-minute rail trip from Meadowbank to the city and then bike up Constitution Hill to university. That was faster than taking the car in rush hour because of the traffic jam. So rail can't be the whole answer, but we have to have very good connectivity and a single ticket - integrated ticketing between rail, bus and ferry. You have got to have provision for bikes at stations and on the trains.

Actually when you look at the population density in Auckland, it's really interesting that all of the western and the southern rail lines have got the densest populations. I did a study on that when I was in the planning department at Auckland University. They have densities comparable to European cities. The rest of Auckland hasn't. It's more comparable to the North American cities which are car dependent. So were always going to have a bit of a hybrid system.

Public transport accounts for only 7 per cent of trips to work, Aucklanders are almost one car per person at the moment. Shouldn't the money go where the users are?

If the money always follows where the users are, then we build more and more unsustainable and congested cities. The money has actually got to lead where you want people to go. The reason that only 7 per cent of commuter travel is on public transport at the moment is that public transport isn't good enough. There has been a big increase of patronage of both buses and rail since the funding started leaning in that direction and you have to pursue that further. When the rail is only capable of carrying 4 million passenger trips a year, people aren't going to use it any more than that. You've got to put the funding in and get those 50 million passenger trips a year and that will really make a difference to road congestion in Auckland.

Would you control car imports to improve exhaust emissions?

I've been calling for fuel efficiency standards for vehicles for many years. We're still importing vehicles into this country that use 15 litres to travel 100km. I've just bought a car that uses 5 litres and it wasn't a hybrid or expensive. We're saddling the future with huge fuel bills that people won't be able to pay by allowing those cars into the country at a time when people are still not sufficiently switched on to fuel efficiency to make their own decisions. In fact the public are starting to move faster than the Government is because we've just had news in the past week that sales of Commodores and Falcons are down and sales of smaller cars are up with the higher petrol prices.

The Government has been extraordinary slow to set fuel efficiency and emission standards for vehicles coming into the country.