Tim Hazledine: Billions of reasons for another look

COMMENT

I have a question for mayors John Banks and Sir Barry Curtis, and other supporters of the proposed eastern highway, for which the forecast cost has gone from $460 million to up to $3.9 billion in two years.

The question is this: at what price would you walk away from this project? $5 billion? $7 billion?

This is not a question they are going to want to answer because they will look bad whichever way they answer.

If they say there is no price that would not be worth paying, they will be dismissed as fanatical petrolhead zealots. If they claim the project would be worth, say, $5.5 billion but not a penny more, they strain our sense of what is reasonable.

Even without further cost overruns, the project, at more than $100 million for each kilometre of new road, is clearly way out in wacky-land.

At its original estimated cost of less than half a billion dollars, you might have had a decent argument, but not now.

The good news from this is that we must expect reason will now prevail and the project will be abandoned. But the bad news is that it is going to take a big fight and a continued waste of time that should be spent developing an economically and environmentally sound strategy for our transport system.

What would such a strategy look like? It has to be based on the basic truth that you cannot "solve" traffic congestion in a large, growing city.

Land is at a premium in central Auckland, which means it is efficient to substitute time for space - to put up with some traffic delays and congestion. To try to eliminate this by gold-plating the road system is stupid - it will merely push land values up further at considerable expense to hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens.

The second basic fact is that congestion is caused by the private motor vehicle - in particular by cars with one driver and no other passengers, and this is not going to change soon.

Public transport enthusiasts can be as fanatical as the petrolheads in their attitude to private cars. They must understand and respect why people continue to drive themselves to and from work each day in solitary splendour.

For most of us, our car is the best designed and most comfortable environment we will experience through the hours of the day. For many, the drive is the only time of autonomous solitude between the bustle of work and family.

I do not want to glamorise being stuck in a traffic jam, but transport researchers have found that people tend to be quite comfortable with a journey to work of up to about 25 minutes, whatever its distance. This is something that has to be taken into account - as it is not in the notorious figure that the Auckland "gridlock" costs us $1 billion a year.

What about people commuting from, say, the North Shore, whose journeys at rush hour can take a lot longer than 25 minutes?

It is worth noting that their interests and those of many other commuters would be harmed by the eastern highway because it would increase congestion in the central city.

But for these and other travellers, including those from the eastern suburbs, there are two quite achievable steps towards making life on the road tolerable again.

The first is to ensure that all motorists are paying not just the private costs of their road use, such as fuel and depreciation, but are factoring into their transport decision the "externalities" - the costs that, in particular, vehicle emissions and adding to congestion impose on other road users and on the community.

This may entail introducing an electronic, time-of-day tolling system, such as operates in Singapore and London.

It may also justify a regional petrol tax to pay for improvements to the transport infrastructure.

The second sensible policy step is to give people an alternative. If, facing the full costs of private motoring - including traffic delays - they still want to drive their cars, fair enough. But they should not be forced to drive for lack of another way to go.

This means more buses travelling faster in more bus lanes, and, hopefully, a few more and more reliable trains as well.

There is nothing novel or radical about proposals for a transport strategy that balances supply-side and demand-side policies.

We are doing some of it already, as are other cities like Auckland, such as Vancouver, which has never allowed urban motorways to be built.

Some money will need to be spent, but it does not look so expensive in comparison to the eastern highway dinosaur.

Perhaps, in the long run, we will become grateful to the promoters of this grandiloquent scheme for focusing attention on the absurdity of continued urban motorway construction, and forcing us to come up with more practical alternatives.

* Tim Hazledine is a professor of economics at Auckland University.