Editorial: Don't lose head over highway lunacy

Several times this holiday period we have reported the frustration of holidaymakers held up on the highway north of Auckland. We could have carried a similar report almost every day. Something has gone seriously wrong in our road planning and some people should be hiding their heads in shame.

The Northern Motorway out of Auckland was extended to Orewa as the first stage of a project that should eventually take it to Puhoi. With the first stage opened, the motorway drops traffic into an Orewa back street, creating a bottleneck worse than any presented before the Orewa bypass was partially opened.

Previously, traffic was often reduced to a crawl between Waiwera and Albany but that seems a fond memory when set beside the hold-ups in which motorists have been mired for hours on most days this week. It used to be that holiday jams were predictable - the first and last hours of a long weekend or the beginning and end of the Christmas-New Year break - and it was possible to schedule your journey to avoid them. Not now. People who thought they were avoiding peak days this week found themselves trapped for hours in tailbacks from the Orewa folly.

It must be infuriating, and the mood will not be helped by appeals from the traffic authorities for motorists to control their tempers and exercise patience. "How dare they?" will be the common reaction. The appeals may not come from the same traffic authorities that had a hand in designing this mess but the suffering public is in no mood to make the distinction. The powers, whoever they be, have created monumental havoc this time.

The police, who must deal with any boilover, are not to blame. They will be as frustrated as anybody by this road-design debacle, and their appeals for patience must be heeded. People returning to Auckland this weekend will have to accept the disgraceful situation, and the difficulty that lies ahead. Acceptance of a hardship can, after all, help to surmount it. And if drivers abide by the maxim that patience is a remedy for every grief, examples of road rage may yet be kept to a minimum.

But even those who achieve a saintly serenity will surely reflect on how it has come to this; how a country with a small population can have traffic jams as bad as those in some of the world's most congested places.

The many New Zealanders who have endured the torture of driving, say, from London to England's south coast, whether to Brighton, Eastbourne or elsewhere, now have a comparable experience - without an obvious explanation for it. The answer, in fact, lies in decades of neglect by both central and local government and, more particularly, the failure of the former to use a tax as it was intended.

Even before last year's increase in petrol tax, the Government collected many more millions from fuel sales than it spent on roading and public transport. Taxes account for about a third of the price at the pump, and only half of that taxation is invested in transport. The rest goes into the black hole of general Government spending.

Auckland's plight should by now have brought a realistic response in terms of strategy and financing. Yet even the Government's latest land transport plan appears as hamstrung as many of its predecessors. Demands on the public purse, the result of the years of negligence, have produced a logical nod in the direction of toll roads, built by public-private sector partnerships. Unfortunately, the prospectus published so far could present private partners with a degree of risk they will not accept.

That, and Green distractions in the roading strategy, will be far from the minds of motorists this weekend. And they should not delay the building of an efficient highway system to serve a city of Auckland's relatively modest size. Until then, however, patience must occupy the driver's seat.

Herald feature: Getting Auckland moving