Jeanette Fitzsimons: Transport solution must involve more than cars

It will take a more balanced approach to transport planning to relieve Auckland's traffic jams, and that is just what the Land Transport Management Bill sets out to achieve.

Decades of overseas experience show this approach will reduce pollution, strengthen communities and make our streets safer. The bill brings faster, more reliable public transport, a greater commitment to walking and cycling, heavy freight travelling on a well-maintained rail system, and urban design that makes it easier to live, work and play without travelling long distances.

For decades, reports have advocated that improvements to roading and public transport take place in parallel. The roading has been done, but there has been no time, energy, money or political will left to build public transport.

A rapid-rail transit system has been advocated since 1949, including a well-developed plan put forward by NZ Rail in 1990. To our great loss, that was not supported by Auckland local government.

Now that we have a political consensus in Auckland to move forward with rapid transit, we have to play catch-up.

National MP John Key's extremist approach, as set out in a Dialogue article, continues the mistakes of the past. He wrote: "Yes, we need to boost our public transport, but the first requirement is to ensure we have a viable infrastructure of modern motorways."

Auckland has 182km of motorway (including on and off-ramps), which has driven the development of a long, string-like city where people live further and further from where they work, shop, play and go to school.

Aucklanders are driving more kilometres each year just to do what they have always done. Demand for transport is not a given - it is created by settlement patterns and by new roads.

What the Greens have added to the new transport legislation is balance. Roading improvements will proceed, and, in fact, will have by far the largest slice of the new funding announced by the Government and the Greens last February. But now other options will be developed as well, so commuters and freight have real choice.

In reading the bill, Mr Key has let his imagination run away with him. There is nothing that requires "instant self-sufficiency" for new motorways as he claims; and nothing that demands they be financed solely out of the tolls they generate.

There are many options: tolls that pay for the road over its whole lifetime; payments from the land transport fund to a private company for building and operating the road; a mix of tolls and government funding. But whatever mix is used must be transparent.

If a road is not economic because there is not enough demand to generate the tolls to pay for it, and other road users have to subsidise it, that ought to be transparent and properly debated.

The constraint in the bill that Mr Key has probably misread is the Greens' determination that we will not get caught, as Melbourne did, in having to compensate a private company if traffic volumes do not grow as expected.

The PPP agreement for the Melbourne Citylink motorway from the airport to town contains such a compensation clause. Now that the city wants to extend rapid rail to the airport, it cannot without paying out huge sums to the private road partner for reducing traffic and, therefore, toll revenue.

One contract for a PPP road has hog-tied transport policy for decades, and prevented a sensible public transport alternative.

The bill specifically outlaws such compensation clauses, which is simply prudent guardianship of the public purse and the Greens are proud of it. Nor should it be a surprise; it was announced in the transport policy package released by Cabinet last February.

For the first time, the Government is saying that transport policy must serve economic, public health, safety and environmental goals. Good ideas will be funded; white elephants will not.

The National Party seems to be taking a more and more extreme position on transport, with Roger Sowry advocating spending many billions of your dollars on a multi-lane road from Auckland to Wellington. The last time National committed us to a think-big programme, where the public purse took all the risk, was under Muldoon. It led to financial and environmental disasters and left the country in debt.

Mr Key says he wants "a motorway system to see us through the next 100 years". Does he really think he can see into the future that well?

There are a few things we do know: in 100 years oil will be in very limited supply and probably not burned in internal combustion engines; and climate change will have raised sea levels threatening some coastal roads, but we don't know by how much. Information technology will have changed working and shopping patterns.

We have no idea what size or shape Auckland will be. Could anyone have predicted Auckland's current needs in 1903? Does Mr Key really want to lock in current transport patterns and technologies for the next 100 years?

The one thing we do know is that the future will not be much like the past. What is constant is people's need for clean air and water, safety and exercise, all threatened by current transport patterns.

The car will remain a dominant form of transport for the foreseeable future, but we cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the health, economic and environmental problems created by a high level of car dependence. Everything from obesity, diabetes and heart disease to child injury will be reduced by a little more balance in transport policy. We need to build in options and find transport solutions that work for everyone; solutions that serve our health and well-being and create choice.

That is the balance the Greens have contributed to the new legislation.

* Jeanette Fitzsimons is a Greens co-leader.

Herald feature: Getting Auckland moving