Philippa Stevenson: A traffic jam of suggestions for fixing our roads

Express a view about traffic congestion, tolls, rail or tax and the email clogs like the Auckland motorway at 5pm - or anytime, really.

The odd one comes with the electronic equivalent of road rage; others are as packed with facts as a commuter bus at rush-hour.

Who knew, for instance, that 74 per cent of South Korea's 87,534km of road is paved. Or that Belgium has 58,240 more kilometres of road than South Korea but roughly the same percentage of paved roads.

The same international source says New Zealand has 92,200km of road, of which 58 per cent is paved.

I checked the data. The 1999 New Zealand Official Yearbook stated we have 74 national and provincial state highways and motorways comprising 10,453km. In addition, there are 15,286km of urban roads and 66,137km of rural roads, making a total of 92,876 km of developed roading.

Transit NZ figures from June last year had a slightly higher figure of 10,883km of major roads and motorways, a national asset worth $11 billion and which carries 48 per cent of all New Zealand's traffic.

We have about 2.6 million vehicles, mostly cars but about 500,000 trucks.

In a previous column I suggested that toll roads, as shown by Tauranga, could help to provide better roads, and that rail should all but be consigned to the history books.

There was colourful disagreement. "The best way to increase congestion and make it a much worse problem is to expand the capacity for the problem to exist in, like trying to put a fire out with petrol," said one reader.

Another suggested: "Trying to solve road traffic problems by adding and widening roads is like trying to solve a weight problem by loosening your belt by a notch or two."

And one reader said: "I have lived in London, Melbourne, Osaka, Tokyo and Paris and it is far easier and cheaper to travel and move around those cities by public transport than car or taxi."

Others disagreed and one maintained that "there isn't a railway system in this world (apart from Hong Kong) that is generating enough cashflow to replace the tracks and service the capital invested. This is why they require taxpayer subsidies to stay in business."

The fact that the money collected for the national roads fund has been "hijacked" by successive governments for other uses is a sore point with many readers.

Other countries' solutions offered for comparison included Japan, where, said one reader, road construction had kept pace with an increase of cars from 3.4 million in 1960 to 75 million in 2000 for a population of 127 million.

In Japan, a country of similar size to New Zealand, as at March 2001 there were 7843km of arterial, high-standard highways, a figure that is expected to increase to 14,000km in the next 20 years.

"If it wasn't for its serious consequences, New Zealand's traffic congestion would be a joke," he wrote.

"Why can't we organise the mere two million vehicles that run on this country's roads?"

A Tauranga resident had no desire "to see toll booths littering the countryside".

He preferred that the existing petrol tax and road-user charges be used exclusively for roading because they had many advantages over tolling as a revenue-collecting device.

Taxation was "not limited in its application - tolling only suits high-volume roads with a long alternative route - has low costs to implement and administer, and will not create traffic delays or distort behaviour, such as deterring potential users".

"A toll at the Tauranga Harbour Bridge again, for instance, would cost $1 million a year to operate and would send an extra 10,000 vehicles per day 19km around the back way to further clog up the alternative roads. This would bring forward expensive Transit works necessary to accommodate the increased traffic flows."

But tolling was appropriate for financing expensive new "local road" projects that offered better service for private benefit, as opposed to state highways that provided national economic benefits and were best funded by a broader-based tax, he said.

Whatever the point of view, one reader summed it up for us all.

"If we do not do something dramatically then New Zealand will still be talking about this problem 20 years from now and the environment will suffer, as well as the people in these islands."

* Email Philippa Stevenson