If you’re old enough, then you’ll remember there was a time when every Kiwi household had to pick a weekday when they wouldn’t drive.
Carless Days were introduced in 1979 as an attempt to reduce petrol consumption amid a global oil shock, thanks to the Iranian Revolution.
The scheme was short-lived – it was scrapped in 1980, after it achieved only a minimal reduction in petrol use. It was widely considered a failure, with failure, black-market exemptions, forgeries, and two-car households that dodged the scheme entirely.
Other measures included cutting open-road speed limits and restricting the hours during which petrol stations could sell petrol. At one point, someone caught selling petrol on the weekend, for instance, could face a fine or jail time.
With petrol now topping $3 a litre, over twice the real 1979 peak, the question’s being asked as to whether we should re-introduce the Muldoon-era scheme.
Ministers are getting advice on how low fuel supplies have to go before the Government should introduce demand measures such as reducing the amount of petrol people can buy and only allowing fuel outlets to open on alternate days.
Transport commentator and Greater Auckland director Matt Lowrie told The Front Page that there are other ways we could conserve fuel.
“Things that could reduce fuel use might be things like reducing speed limits on our state highways. Reducing it from 100km/h to 80 km/h would take a little longer [to get somewhere], but that does reduce fuel.
“We do need to be encouraging more walking and cycling, more public transport in our cities where it’s possible. Those are big things that we can encourage people to change how they travel.
“We should be looking at businesses that can encourage working from home again. A lot of businesses have started to shift back to being in the office a lot more. Still not necessarily what it was prior to Covid, but the technology exists.
“I think other things also are that there’s a lot of freight that could potentially be moved more to the rail network that we could encourage. That might require more funding for KiwiRail to get more staff and pay more staff throughout those times to operate those trains and process all that, but that could be an option,” he said.
A long-term solution to alleviate our reliance on fuel would be better uptake of electric vehicles, Lowrie said.
“They were up to about 15% of sales prior to when the government removed the clean car discount back in 2023. They’ve dropped off now to more like 4% of sales.
“Quick numbers would suggest that had that discount continued, and that rate continued, we would have had about 30,000 more electric vehicles on our roads now, possibly more.
“That’s a small number in the grand scheme of how many vehicles we have on our roads, but every bit will help in helping people get around and helping the economy continue.
“Moving back to encouraging more people to buy an EV, whether that be through some sort of rebate scheme, the Government should be considering long-term. Other countries have done that, like Norway, for example. I think it’s up to 90% of sales being EVs now from those sorts of rebates.
“But, there’s gonna be a challenge, particularly in the short-term, because there’s gonna be a lot of demand to buy those cars. There’s not gonna be a lot of stock in the country.”
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The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
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