Jack Tame: Our own perfect commuter storm

Traffic on the Southern Motorway heading south is at a crawl. Photo / Natalie Slade

Opinion

Many Easters ago, we travelled to Stewart Island for a holiday now etched into family lore. We ferried from Bluff in what were probably average conditions by Foveaux Strait standards, but what I remember as resembling an end-of-times, perfect-storm swell.

The piddly catamaran strained and lurched and dropped off the back of waves the size of apartment blocks while my brave-as-bricks brother screamed the entire journey.

"I don't want to die. Daddy ... I'm TOO YOUNG TO DIE!"

He didn't, which was nice, but every minute on land thereafter was marred by knowing we'd all soon be back on the ferry and making the return trip.

They don't get those seas in the Gulf, but taking a long weekend from Auckland over Easter makes for commuting horror of another kind. The stuck-on-the-southern-and-going-nowhere-fast kind, where you're shifting in your seat and creeping and stopping and losing all will to go on.

Except, just like Stewart Islanders and 100ft swells, Aucklanders are all to experienced with stagnant traffic grinding away at their sanity.

The GPS navigation company TomTom does an annual survey of congestion and this year's results suggest New Zealand may be even worse than we thought. On average, Aucklanders add 95 hours a year to their commute by sitting in traffic. Wellingtonians add 93 and Cantabrians add 77.

It's enough to make Auckland the 41st most-congested city in the world, better than Istanbul but somehow more congested than New York.

That's right. Auckland is more congested than New York City, which might surprise any tourist caught on Fifth Ave at 5pm, but doesn't surprise me one bit.

Because in New York most people don't drive their daily commute. They take the subway, the train, the ferry or the bus. I guess the city figures awesome public transport is critical for logistical as well as economic reasons. It doesn't make sense to have people losing weeks of working hours sitting in traffic.

Mull it on the drive home tomorrow. Consider Auckland's ballooning population and urban sprawl. And let's avoid a perfect storm.

Jack Tame is on Newstalk ZB Saturdays, 9am-midday.