Philippa Stevenson: As NZ's past lay with rail, the future lies in better roads

It seems the definition of crazy for the Government to spend $885 million bailing out Air New Zealand to ensure tourists get here in First-World style only to let them loose on Third-World roads.

In some countries, spending $75 million on a railway network might make it fit for sightseers and locals. Not here. All we'll get for that bailout is the same rundown trains and the last few Soweto-type stations still standing.

The railways may have opened up New Zealand and fostered prosperity in its pioneering days but since 1984 and the lifting of the heavy hand of Government regulation, New Zealanders, both as private individuals and businesses, have been voting with their tyres.

Nothing meets our personal and business transport needs more conveniently, practically, economically or flexibly than rubber meeting road.

As a frequent Hamilton-Auckland commuter I was delighted when a daily rail service was launched - until I tried it. The staff were helpful in a fatalistic "we're all in this mess together" kind of way.

One gave me change out of her pocket when I didn't have the right money for a sandwich. I was not impressed when we sat at the graffiti-covered Huntly station for 30 minutes - some foul-up with water for the train.

Patronage was not good - probably because few of us have regular 8am to 5pm jobs - but freight, not passengers, is Tranz Rail's core business so the good idea got shunted into the siding.

It may be a great ideal to have efficient public transport but it is not realistic to expect to educate people into taking something that doesn't exist. It does us little good to stand at the bus stop or the rail station when the bus won't be going to our destination, and the train won't be coming at all.

Just improving the roads we've got makes a vast difference, let alone finishing off routes that were abandoned or making new ones.

The very day I stopped commuting weekly between Hamilton and Auckland a large section of the Waikato expressway opened.

For years I'd crawled behind lumbering trucks and lengthy trails of cars on the twice-weekly torture of the goat track known as State Highway 1.

If this is the country's numero uno highway, visitors to the country must ask, what can two, or three, or wonder of wonders, 45 be like?

Even only partially completed, the expressway has taken up to half an hour off a peak traffic journey. For businesses that is going to be worth a lot of money.

I don't buy into the "Auckland or the rest" debate. I've run my life around Auckland's congestion and sat in enough of it to know that money desperately needs to be spent to stop our biggest city clogging up for good on one wet Friday.

Our Government seems fond of coming to the rescue on big-ticket items - $1.6308 billion to rescue the BNZ, Air New Zealand and Tranz Rail. Let it see roads in the same light.

Apparently, it has another $1 billion a year up its sleeve that it collects from road users but doesn't spend on roads. That would nearly double current spending.

And surely, when it comes to finding more, Tauranga has shown the way with its toll roads.

It paid for its $27 million harbour bridge with a toll, though it got a bit carried away by collecting $90 million when it failed to lift the charge when the goods were bought and paid for.

Now, it's about to launch another toll road, Route K, which it has funded with a $45 million loan. It could take 30 years to pay it off at the rate of $1 a car, $2 a small truck, and $4 a large truck.

If you don't want to pay, you take a different, slower route. You'll get the same experience overseas. In Italy, we could choose to meander the smaller byways and get a taste of the countryside, or we could whiz along motorways, stopping briefly to zipzap the credit card for a few Euros as we exited.

I discovered what a turnpike was - a toll road by another name - with my first encounter with the New Jersey version in America.

And it wasn't just rail that opened up New Zealand. There were many toll gates on our roads from the mid-1860s to the early l900s. Wellington's foreshore highway was one of the earliest targets for collections.

Christchurch and Dunedin had their share of toll gates, and Taranaki was peppered with them.

The Main Highways Board Act passed in 1925, led to the closing of New Zealand's early toll gates.

Parliament's Transport and Industrial Relations committee is considering the Land Transport Management Bill and is due to report on September 8.

It will be doing us all a favour if it allows both local authority-controlled roads, and state highways to be funded by tolls.

* Email Philippa Stevenson