John Roughan: Just wandering by car - it's the best way to go

For reasons best known to accountants I had to take a holiday. Arrears of leave looked bad on their books. So I did something I used to do as a kid in the country and sometimes since, when I had a day to myself. I went on a "wander".

That's what my mother used to call it when she'd look out from our house and spot me ranging over the hills in the long southern twilight. The pleasure, I remember, was the pure absence of purpose. With no particular place to go and nothing especially to do, I would travel on impulse, interested in where the mood would take me.

This time I could take a week and do the same thing by car. What a liberating thing it is to be able to travel fast and far, where and when you please, in privacy. Tote up the 20th century's contributions to better life and the automobile is still up there with the best.

Not long before I left, the Herald took a close look at road charging proposals drawn up by the Ministry of Transport at the invitation of metropolitan mayors who hope to get Aucklanders out of their cars.

Fat chance. The price of petrol lately hasn't noticeably reduced the traffic and nor would a toll cordon or parking tax.

People would grumble and pay. They were grumbling so much in the paper the day I drove away that the present Government has probably shelved the idea, which is a pity. For the right form of road charge could cure Auckland's logjams.

The problem with all the options offered by the mayors and the ministry is that charges would be unavoidable unless you used public transport, which is never going to match the convenience of a car in a well spread city.

The answer is a charge avoidable by car. In three-lane motorways it could easily be done. Gantries over one lane could display a toll to enter it. The charge could rise or fall to keep the lane flowing at the speed limit. You would pay only the rate at which you entered.

When free lanes became choked those whose time was precious, or in a hurry for any reason, would move into the toll lane and incidentally improve the flow in free lanes. Everyone would be better off. Quite likely, the benefit would be felt in the feeding streets too.

Electronic tolling equipment is said to be expensive and the revenue it collects might barely cover the cost. But so what? Reducing congestion is the purpose, isn't it?

Sadly no. The real purpose of those proposals was to drive people onto public transport and raise revenue for a forlorn Auckland railway, not to facilitate the way people prefer to travel.

I managed to banish such cares well before the Bombay Hills and veered towards Waikato's west coast, where I'd never really been. Once through Tuakau and across the river, I had the road to myself, lost in hill country so lovely in the sun I could wish only for a convertible.

With no plans, no bookings, nowhere in particular to be, I dawdled down to Raglan one day, Kawhia the next, windows down, driving slow on the dirt roads so that stones didn't rattle underneath and the engine couldn't drown the sounds of birds in the bush groves.

Slower and slower. Sometimes, when the road crested a hill and the farmland below presented a picture to excel any landscape painting, the car would come to a stop in the country silence.

It becomes so pleasant to travel at that pace that you don't want to reach a highway unless it's late in the day and you need to find a bed, which isn't hard in rural New Zealand now. Every second farm seems to be doing a side business in tourism.

After a sublime farmstay on the Taranaki coast, impulse took me inland, through backroads to Taumarunui where I put the foot down and didn't stop until the Ureweras. It was raining lightly and mist hung in the ranges exactly as it is supposed to.

When I'd tramped every bush path near the Waikaremoana motor camp I moved on. A day or two later I was at the East Cape and could wander no further.

Funny how worries start when you turn for home. Hicks Bay was out of gas. Normally I love the frisson of running on empty but it is further than I thought across the cape. The next pump, at Waihou Bay, had closed for the night, leaving me stranded in the loveliest place of all.

Watching the sun set on the Bay of Plenty I decided this was the spot for my beach house and helicopter. Personal air travel used to feature 50 years ago in all the visions of the 21st century, with other fanciful notions such as tiny wireless telephones in everyone's pocket and home computers that even children could use.

But governments everywhere kept tight control of airways and scheduled line services in ever larger vehicles are still the only form of air travel available to most people. Social controllers prefer land transport in that form too.

They detest the proliferation of personal motor vehicles and favour fixed line mass transit. Auckland's regional planners actually aim to reconfigure the residential patterns of the city to make a railway worthwhile.

It is good that Michael Cullen has refused to relieve the Regional Council of the need to present the bill to its electors. Good, too, that his Budget this week put its money on roads. There's still no better way to go.