John Roughan: Dice loaded in bid to get in the fast lane

Why do you want to pay a toll?" asked the host of TVNZ's Agenda programme during a discussion of the proposal for Auckland's western ring road. When you take a counter-intuitive view on a live microphone you are vulnerable to the most innocent question.

There is a moment, no more, to crystallise an explanation that needs an essay. Honesty precluded an easy way out: "Well, I wouldn't say 'want' exactly ... " So you take the question all the way down to base matter, subcortex, where intuition operates.

And the instant truth you tap can be a surprise. Yes, I do positively want the toll. Why? "Because roads are like anything else," I blurted, "you get what you pay for."

It sounded right at the time and it sounds more right the more I think about it. But I hear the obvious rejoinder that we have paid, or can pay, for roads with taxes.

That will be the standard response to the mail-out to Aucklanders this month by the national roading authority, Transit NZ, asking our views on its tolling proposition.

Taxation is a way of financing amenities that should not be restricted by a charge at the door. Roading is one of those. It would be nothing short of oppressive to be unable to venture anywhere in a vehicle without running up a bill. That bleak prospect was briefly proposed when every blessed creation of the state was being corporatised, but this is not the same. This is choice.

Taxation offers none of the choices that paying ordinarily implies. There is no choice to pay, no priorities the individual can set, no selection of services, nothing for the taxpayer to do except take what politics decides and join the inevitable queue for any finite thing offered free.

Queue is what you do for free non-urgent surgery, or to get your child into a nearly free prestigious school, and queue is what you do on main roads during periods of peak demand.

Those who would sooner queue than pay for anything they expect from taxation, have their choice preserved by the law governing road charges. To put tolls on a road anywhere there must be a "reasonable free alternative".

That precludes most arteries of a long, thinly-populated land, but the law is even more stacked against the rights of drivers willing to pay. A tolling proposal has to find some sort of approval from the "community".

In other words, those who prefer to queue can prevent my choice though I have no similar opportunity to frustrate theirs. And those who prefer to queue for anything tend to resent the possibility that anyone could pay to avoid it.

The dice is loaded before public consultation begins, and rather than presenting a bold argument for traffic rationing on principle, Transit has chosen to make an apologetic financial plea.

With $1.3 billion allocated from taxation, Transit says, it can complete the western ring - a motorway from Manukau to Albany crossing the western suburbs and upper harbour - by 2025. With an extra $800 million from tolls it could finish it 10 years earlier.

The road is fairly urgent, not least because it is supposed to be the solution to the dog routes to Auckland Airport through the isthmus.

The western ring looks like the dog route to beat them all. To go to the airport, North Shore residents will be expected to head due west, cross the Greenhithe bridge, pass the airport they could have at Whenuapai and take the northwestern motorway to Mangere, paying $7 for the privilege.

From the central city, travellers will be supposed to go west to Pt Chevalier, then southeastward on the new route to the airport. And pay tolls into the bargain.

It does not sound likely, unless your are one of those who regularly has to leave for a domestic flight from Mangere two hours before the flight departs. If a toll road around the upper harbour can reduce that journey to a more reasonable 40 minutes it would be well worth the $7 bill.

Only a toll can quickly release the hares from the tortoises in a line of traffic. Hares are not necessarily wealthier or more impatient than the tortoises. Their need is usually simply more urgent.

They are as likely to be tradesmen due at a job or mothers delivering children to a music lesson, as fat cats in the fast lane. The tolls are easily affordable. It makes perfect sense in social equity as well as economic efficiency, to give people a means of making a faster trip.

The best feature of Transit's plan for the partially constructed Western ring is that the motorway from Westgate to Waterview will be tolled only in one lane in each direction, since there is no reasonable free alternative to that stretch.

Tolling one lane, with electronic sensors in overhead gantries, presents travellers with the ideal choice. The toll charge can be varied in response to demand and shown on the gantries. As you drive you can see how much it would cost to escape the congestion, and as more drivers entered the paying lane the price would rise for the next entrants. It would rise to the point that no more traffic entered when the lane was still flowing at the speed limit.

With tax we will get finite freeways and infinite traffic. With tolls we can beat congestion. It's Auckland's choice.