Owen McShane: Traffic plan anything but 'smart'

COMMENT


The road users and councils of Auckland negotiated a deal with the Government which accepted an increase in petrol taxes on the understanding that these extra dollars would be used to rapidly complete the city's roading network.

Well, the taxes have been increased but the revenue will not be spent on roads.

The first irony is that although the Government has chastised Auckland local bodies for lacking a united voice, its transport package reveals a split in the Cabinet.

The statements by Michael Cullen and Paul Swain recognise that Auckland's congestion problem demands spending on roads, and they say so. But Helen Clark's statement shifted the direction by avoiding the word 'roads' in favour of "transport infrastructure", "land transport initiatives" and a "sustainable transport system". Judith Tizard's statement never mentions roads.

Chris Carter, the Minister of Local Government, probably most clearly reflects what the Auckland Regional Council and the Greens want through his statement which says: "The Government proposes that responsibility for Auckland transport issues, such as rail, bus, ferry, pedestrian and cycle transport, reside with one organisation to be called the Auckland Regional Transport Authority."

No roads for cars at all.

The Green Party statement is transparently honest when it says: "Congestion is crippling Auckland but the sequence must be: first, provide alternatives to the car, then look at pricing measures, and then see what smart roading initiatives are needed, based on the new traffic patterns. That means public transport, walking and cycling initiatives and demand management."

The Government's first fact sheet explains that the new Auckland Regional Transport Authority will be accountable to the regional council. Auckland Regional Council politicians will have eight votes on the panel and the Auckland councils will have one vote each, totalling seven. The regional council rules.

Infrastructure Auckland will be replaced by Auckland Regional Holdings, which will report to the regional council and will manage the present Infrastructure Auckland assets. These funds can be spent only on public transport projects.

The regional council is biased against cars and has staked out its confidence in the theory of Smart Growth as the solution to Auckland's problems. Smart Growth (a failed American concept) promotes travel demand management and urban intensification with development focused on rail and bus stations and at such densities that street congestion forces people from their cars onto trains.

Any experts on the Auckland Regional Transport Authority board will also face the dilemma of the directors of Infrastructure Auckland: they will find that none of the acceptable projects meet normal investment criteria. They will then be criticised for their failure to act. As the investment analysts resign, the regional council electoral panel will replace them with visionaries who share the Smart Growth dream.

Then we learn that the petrol excise increases will not take effect until April 2005 and that the Government's contribution will take effect from July 2005.

One explanation for this delay is that Transit New Zealand has unspent funds. Hence why give it money when it has not spent what it has. Maybe they should be told to hurry up.

The Government's fact sheet sets the real priorities when it says: "Funding for Auckland will be focused on transport demand management, further improving public transport and an acceleration of some roading projects."

"Travel demand management" means reducing personal mobility in private vehicles in favour of public transport. "Some roading" probably means roads to railway stations.

The total package reveals that another reason for the delay is to give the regional council and the councils time to rewrite their Resource Management Act policy statements to give effect to Smart Growth.

Mr Carter said that better Auckland transport needed changes to the Auckland regional policy statement (under the act). He is well aware that the Smart Growth theories of the Canterbury Regional Council were overturned by the Environment Court, one reason being that the regional policy statements did not embody the direction and control of land use which the Smart Growth theory demands.

(Mind you, nor does the Resource Management Act but that does not seem to matter too much these days.)

He then explained that the future policy statement would "provide a better basis for consent decisions through upgraded polices on integrated transport development and urban land use intensification".

Urban land use intensification is intended to increase the catchment available to trains and to create so much congestion on local streets that residents will abandon their cars in favour of public transport. Inadequate car parking is also intended to makes cars less attractive, as city dwellers are discovering.

In effect, these policies make Auckland City less attractive and will destroy the Auckland economy as people and businesses migrate out of the congested and polluted mess.

Smart Growth theories are fixated on central-city commuter traffic and totally disregard the fact that only roads can serve the commercial and industrial travel needs of the modern economy, let alone all those people who have no interest in commuting into the city centre.

Aucklanders believed that the new package would speed up construction of planned projects.

The Minister of Transport's statement allowed for the funding of key roads within identified constraints. But the package has no plans to remove those constraints. The Resource Management Act process will continue to constrain roading in Auckland, as Rodney knows only too well.

The Alpurt proposal for Rodney is at the top of the list of Transit's road-building programme. Coincidentally, on December 12, when the Government announced its transport package, Transit filed documents with the Environment Court which included a timeline for the project. The earliest start date is December 2004, and the latest is July 2005. If this is fast-tracking, what does slow-tracking look like?

No matter how much money is poured into a rail system it will do nothing to get rid of congestion. At most, the extra passengers who end up riding the trains will amount to less than one year's growth in traffic - and they siphon off huge funds in subsidies so that buses are starved for funding. And the trains do nothing for commerce and industry.

Auckland's councils should reject the package, if only because it fails to honour the taxes-for-roads deal negotiated with the Government. And the package will lead to even more congestion in Auckland, and this extra congestion will be on your neighbourhood streets.

* Owen McShane is the director of the Centre for Research Management Studies.