We invited festival goers to spin the Pay Equity Wheel of Fortune – Show Me The Money!

They might land on the job of John Key’s female cleaner, paid $14 per hour after 19 years. Or they might land on the job in banking, a sector overwhelmingly dominated by men, at a starting rate of $43.60 hour.

The odds are against women when it comes to receiving fair pay. That’s why Equal Pay is one of our key priorities this election.

The government is implying that the council is trying to force a particular type of development on Auckland – rather than leaving it up to the market.

It’s ironic the government is saying this when, in fact, Auckland’s sprawl is no accident and has little to do with market forces. Instead it is largely due to successive governments unbalanced transport funding policies which have prioritized motorways above all else and over-regulation by the council.

One regulation that drives sprawling development is minimum parking requirements. Whenever I try to explain what minimum parking requirements are peoples’ eyes glaze over and I can see I’m losing them. So here’s a real life example:

Imagine that you’re a developer and you want to take over one of the car yards on Great North Road and turn it into a 4 story development. This development would consist of say 10 apartments. The apartments are 2 bedroom – your market is couples, singletons and young families.

Your development is 2 minutes from a bus stop on Great North Road (one of the most regular bus services in Auckland) which will get the residents of your apartment into the CBD or to the university in 15 minutes.

It is also 7 minutes walk to the local supermarket, 10 minutes from the Grey Lynn library and doctor’s, and 10 minutes walk to the Kingsland rail station.

And it’s just 5 minutes bike or 20 minutes walk to the restaurants and pubs of Ponsonby and K Road. There are various primary schools in the vicinity and some good high schools a short bus trip away.

In short, this is an incredibly accessible location. Many people living in this area might well choose to live without a car.

Building carparking is expensive so you want to offer resident a choice You will build just a few carparks and offer apartments with a carpark at a higher price. Apartments without a carpark will be cheaper.

But the council declines your resource consent application. They say that by council regulation you are required to provide at least 1 carpark for every apartment in the building (more if it’s a big apartment).

To provide those carparks you’re probably going to have to either a) build an underground basement or b) devote one story of your whole building to carparks.

That drives the cost of your development up immensely. It also means that all the potential buyers for your apartments have to pay a higher price – regardless of whether they want a carpark.

You crunch the numbers and decide your development is not economically viable – instead you decide to look at building some detached town houses in a greenfield site on the fringe of Auckland.

The government likes to talk about cutting needless regulation.  Minimum parking requirements are the type of regulation we need to cut.

New Zealanders often talk about how vibrant and fun Wellington City is compared to our other big New Zealand cities. People don’t know why – they just know they like the Wellington CBD. It has so many cool pubs and cafes. It is fun to walk around. It has such high rates of public transport use.

Well, one of the main reasons is that Wellington City Council got rid of all their minimum parking requirements in their CBD in the 1990s.

Rather than criticizing Auckland Council for trying to create a compact city, central government should be listening to Auckland and encouraging the council to get rid of minimum parking requirements and other planning regulations that encourage car dependency and discourage medium density housing.

Otherwise our hopes of providing affordable accessible housing for the 900,000 people projected to move to Auckland over the next 30 years are very slim indeed.

There is a lot of learning going on to find out the causes of the problems we face, and some of the solutions. The gross inequality between the top 1% and the other 99% is an overriding theme – as it is around the world – but the daily general assemblies and the workshops are picking up many other issues.

The mood is positive, with signs like “Awake with the dreamers” and “The beginning is nigh”. Others have a good turn of phrase. I liked “In oil we lust”. Drop down and see the folks sometime. Or check out their website at www.occupyauckland.org.

What I found was a rather more interesting (and also more demanding!) event, the brainchild of an enterprising group of AUT students who donated their time and skills to organising the morning as part of their communications degrees.

Posing as a ‘star’ for the morning, alongside Blair Strang, a real star,  I was invited to compete to see what distance I could clock up on an exercycle in blocks of three minutes.  I don’t find an MP’s lifestyle to be especially conducive to maintaining fitness, but  managed to produce at least some reasonable results, although Blair did manage to take the lead (by a modest margin ) in our final ‘contest‘.

The point of all the silliness and panting was to raise awareness of what Habitat does in the community, and of their plan to host a sponsored ‘Bike and Build’ cycle ride from  Auckland to Wellington next year, with proceeds to go toward completing a building project in Wellington.

So if you are keen to ride all or part of the way between our two largest North Island cities, for a good cause, keep an eye on the Habitat website for details.  You have plenty of time to get fit for it if you start soon!

Describing kaka-beak, Maori musk, Coromandel koromiko and New Zealand myrtle planted alongside the motorway spokesperson Mr Gardner (it would be a Mr Gardner) makes Spaghetti Junction sound more like Tiritiri Matangi.

Apparently “Motorways are a perfect place to encourage a plant like the kaka-beak” I guess much like the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea or the people-free nuclear wasteland surrounding Chernobyl.

I’m wondering if this is all a mix up. Perhaps Transport Minister, Steven ‘Colossus of Roads’ Joyce, sent an instruction to the NZTA for a press release stressing a conservative line but accidentally wrote conservation line.

More likely I think, after losing the economic, environmental, congestion and benefit cost ratio arguments Joyce really is scrapping the barrel for justifications for borrowing billions to pour on more motorways at a time when traffic is down, petrol up and public transport growth through the roof. Talk about green-washing motorways.

Don’t get me wrong, it is good to see some planting and it is better than nothing. However, planting a total of 11 hectares in natives isn’t a justification for the roughly 700 hectares of land and plants these motorways displaced.

But maybe this is the answer to DoCs funding woes. Can you just imagine how many rare plants we could save with the Kahurangi Road of National Significance?

The Transport and Industrial Relations Select Committee was discussing my petition to fast-track the CBD rail link. The committee had already decided that both The Ministry of Transport (MOT) and the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) should be invited to submit on whether or not the government should fund this project based on their research.

However only asking information from MOT and NZTA gave the committee just one side of the story.

I put forward an unsuccessful motion that the Auckland Council should also be able to make a submission on funding for the CBD rail link. Its important to hear from them because they too have prepared an in-depth and internationally-peer reviewed report (unlike the MOT/NZTA’s ‘in-house’ one) and have started the designation process for the link. However, the National MPs on the committee voted to prevent this.

I found it particularly ironic that, of the MPs who voted against, 3 out of the 5 were Aucklanders themselves. Just what are Tau Henare, Jami-lee Ross and Jacqui Blue going to say to their constituents wanting the link? What’s National Party select committee chair David Bennett going to tell his Hamilton constituents who recently found out their rail link to Auckland would terminate at a station that closed ten years ago because Britomart station was at capacity without the rail link?

So why are the National MPs in Auckland so scared of hearing what the Auckland Council has to say? Is it because they know that the public sees the CBD rail loop as being more of a priority for Auckland than their uneconomic Puhoi to Wellsford Holiday Highway?

Why is the Transport Select Committee leaving it up to a Wellingtonian to advocate for Auckland’s voice to be heard?

Do they fear that the council could easily pick holes in the assumptions they made in their own, deeply biased and not internationally peer-reviewed review of the CBD rail link business case? What do you think?

We’ve had some amazing speakers, especially Paul Mees who did a fantastic job opening the conference. It was also great to see his views get covered in the NZ Herald and on Radio NZ.

We had some thought provoking discussions about the impact of the government’s unbalanced transport spending policies on local government decision making and on our economic outlook. In my speech I said that we could save billions from the Government’s books by cutting wasteful spending on new motorway developments and investing in smart public transport initiatives instead.

Some common themes were how much local government are being hurt by the cuts the Minister has proposed to spending on local roads and maintenance. We also discussed how vulnerable the government’s reckless spending on white elephant motorways is making us to fluctuations and rises in the price of oil.

The second day of the conference was focused on action. We opened the day with a presentation from Stephen Jones, the CEO of Better Transport UK. It was inspiring to hear from the director of a professional NGO which advocates for public transport solutions.

We also had some amazing presentations from twenty transport advocacy groups from around the country which I am hoping to put up online soon. We had groups from Whangarei to Gisborne to Auckland to Wellington working on a huge range of issues such as promoting cycle and walking, stopping motorways, saving rural rail lines and promoting new public transport projects.

We also heard from other groups we could usefully work with such as the public health sector, unions, and disability access groups.

We concluded the conference by resolving to stop National’s Roads of National Significance and encourage investment in smart options like rail and better walking and cycling. A steering group has been established to help with national communication.

Overall it has been a really amazing experience. I’m thrilled that we decided to co-host this conference as I really feel that we are at the birth of a new era in New Zealand transport, in which we move towards making sensible transport funding decisions that put people and the environment, not trucks and cars first.

But here’s a bit of a round up of the big transport stories of the last few weeks and my reaction.

More funds for rail upgrades in Wellington. The government has announced an additional $88.4 million of funding to renew the Wellington rail system. This is great and long overdue as the Wellington rail network has major reliability issues. A newer signalling system should help to resolve this.

Cuts to public transport subsidies. The Sunday Star Times picked up some research I did around the cuts to the rate of public transport subsidies the government has just bought in.

These cuts will have major negative impacts on the ability of councils like Hamilton and Auckland to provide quality services. Their only options really are to cut services, raise fares or raise rates. This is such short sighted thinking from the government – especially when public transport patronage is soaring and vehicle traffic on our state highways is dropping.

The release of the Government Policy Statement on Land Transport which allocated $36 billion of funds over the next 10 years. I’ll be writing several more blog posts about this because it’s so important. For now, let’s just say it puts a ridiculously large amount of money into uneconomic and unnecessary state highways and far too little into improving our public transport, walking and cycling infrastructure. You can see more of my reaction to the government’s tragically unbalanced transport funding policies in this  TVNZ interview.

Nikki Kaye comes out in support of trams for central Auckland. Despite various critical responses to this, I think it’s great to see a National MP supporting smarter transport solutions. However, like Jacinda Ardern, I am a little dubious about whether Nikki’s own government would pay for this proposal.

I’m also doubtful about whether it’s wise to call for a tram system without doing a proper cost-benefit analysis of whether it is the best option for this area. I’d like to see a study which compared the costs of a tram versus a better bus service.

It might be possible for us to get say 80% of the benefits of a tram service just from upgrading the bus service at one fifth of the cost. So I’d support Nikki in calling for a study to find out what the best solution for the area is. I’d also like the study to consider whether this should really be a transport priority for Auckland region. There may be other areas that are more in need.

The driving age has risen from 15 to 16 years old, a change that I support as it will mean safer roads for us all.

Finally, I’m co-hosting with Shane Jones the first ever Smart Transport for NZ conference in Parliament on the 19th of August. This should be awesome – I’m excited as we’ll be having some amazing keynote speakers like Dr. Paul Mees, a leading Australasian authority on smart transport. Register online if you’re interested.

We’re not alone, and tonight we’re joined by two former Mayors, four members of Parliament, one Auckland councillor, one New Zealand Entrepreneur of the Year, four Sir Peter Blake Trust Emerging Leaders plus an incredible array of leaders from the community and business sectors.

One-off events like these help raise awareness but the critical thing that needed is Government leadership to seriously inquire into homelessness issues and then develop an across-government homeless strategy backed up with resources. Every Kiwi deserves a warm, healthy home.

Help us raise some cash for the great work Lifewise does: Metiria’s page, and Gareth’s page.

Their narrative is pretty much that people like to live in spread out suburbs with their own back yard and since the advent of the automobile urban sprawl has been inevitable.

But is that actually true or do our own planning regulations encourage our cities to grow and sprawl?

Since I took the transport and housing portfolios I’ve been doing a lot of reading around this topic and listening to planners and experts.

Here is what Joshua Arbury, who is a planner and writes the Auckland Transport Blog has to say about planning regulations in Auckland and whether/how they contribute to sprawl:

“This is because planning in Auckland is completely and utterly broken. Try to build a Ponsonby these days with narrow streets, houses close to each other and close to the street, no off-street parking and so forth and you don’t have a hope in hell of getting resource consent.

Try to build a soulless Dannemora and the planning rules are unlikely to be a problem at all. Massively wide and pedestrian unfriendly roads are actively encouraged, so are as many off-street carparks as possible, so are massively oversized standalone houses on lots of a size that’s really more suitable to terraced housing. Soul-destroying car-dominated ‘town centres’ like Botany, Manukau City and Albany do not exist despite our planning rules, they exist entirely because of our planning rules. It’s actively encouraged to build this:

Building a walkable town centre like Mt Eden or Ponsonby Road would be impossible these days – largely due to the stupidity of requiring huge numbers of parking spaces for every new development.

I don’t always agree with Josh but in this particular post I think he’s right on the money. What do you think?

I encourage you to make an online submission or send in an email too. This discussion document is short but it has some great ideas in it which should be encouraged.

I mainly got interested in it because of the transport aspect – the document suggests that Queen Street should be pedestrianized. It also says many of the other streets in the CBD should be made safer and more attractive for walkers and cyclists. Naturally they want to complete the CBD rail loop (who doesn’t? Apart from the Collosus of Roads that is).

Other exciting ideas include a proposal to two-way Hobson and Nelson Street (which right now are absolute wastelands for everybody not in a motor vehicle) and connect up the waterfront using a light rail system. Of course, this process has already started with the heritage trams at Wynyard Quarter.

What else is discussed that I like the sound of? More tree planting, a heritage trail, sustainability design standards for new buildings, and trying to create an amazing learning precinct.

This would be awesome and sorely needed as right now the two big universities in the CBD (AUT and University of Auckland) don’t really feel very well connected at all.

They also talk about the need to provide more facilities for families living in the city with children and better designed apartments for families. This is something I’m very conscious of, bringing up my kids in a flat in the Wellington CBD. We need more children’s playgrounds and sports fields in our city centres, as well as primary schools.

Finally, they talk about making the waterfront more accessible. They suggest there could be a continuous boulevard and cycle path from the Harbour Bridge through to Saint Heliers. This would be a great use of Tamaki Drive – an outstandingly beautiful road which right now is just dominated by heavy traffic and parking. It would have flow on effects that would increase the value of the land adjacent for business and residential development.

In general, I’m a pretty big fan of the City Centre Master Plan right now. But please do make a submission to try and make it even better! A few ideas I’ve suggested to improve it are daylighting the Horotiu Stream (imagine Queen Street with a stream down the middle – it happened in Seoul where they turned a freeway into a river) and extending the walk/cycle way on Tamaki Drive all the way out across the Harbour Bridge.

The study found that if you commute for 45 minutes plus then your chance of getting divorced is 40% higher than for those with shorter journeys.

This is good news for me (and my wife) given that we live in central Wellington just 15 minutes walk from Parliament.

Also today the Auckland Transport Blog put up a piece showing a new tool that’s been created called Mapnificent which allows you to find out on google maps which locations can be reached within a certain time by public transport.

As the Auckland Transport Blog points out, it’s interesting to run the maps on Auckland. You can see that a lot of areas which are most inaccessible (e.g., Flat Bush) are the areas where there has been major development in Auckland over the last 10 years.

These two pieces made me think about the launch of a book I attended last week called Growth Misconduct: Can We Do Better on Urban Intensification?

The book was based on a range of presentations made in 2010 at a conference on sustainable cities and you can see more about what they covered here.

The presenters at the launch gave some amazing examples of medium and high density developments overseas which have lots of units, flats and terraced housing but still give the residents awesome facilities like private green space, water features, playgrounds etc

Overall, the presentations just reinforced my belief that we have to start thinking harder about how to grow our cities in ways that make us happy.

If there was an Urban Design portfolio I’d be keen to take it because I believe these issues are particularly relevant to people of my own generation. Many people of my age can’t afford the type of quarter acre block that the Baby Boomers aspired to and brought.

In particular, we have to remember that before encouraging new development on the fringes of our city (as the National government would like us to do in Auckland) we should put in place good public transport links first.

Otherwise we will just have more unhappy commuters clogging up our roads.

We stopped at the site of the possible Aotea Square rail station for speeches next to the statue of Mayor Dove Myer-Robinson, which was appropriate considering this was a project he championed decades ago.

It was fun with train-themed music, people dressed as engineers and signs at the other proposed inner-city stations but also serious, calling on the Government to ‘step up to the plate’ and provide the funding in the Budget next week, because Auckland can’t be held back and obviously can’t fund this project alone.

The CBD Rail Loop would transform the rail network, the downtown environs and economy but isn’t cheap. The Government is in a tight fiscal spot signalling serious cuts in next week’s Budget however myopically ignore revenue options, like the Greens’ proposed temporary earthquake levy and still plow-ahead spending $10.7 billion on just 7 new motorways. The Loop should be in next week’s Budget: most of the funds aren’t needed for the Loop for another five years. Also if the costs were spread over the ten years it would take to actually design and construct the tunnel they would only be roughly $200 million annually: affordable, especially considering how much is currently spent subsidising polluters through the National-led Government’s Emissions Trading Scheme.

The lack of the CBD Rail Loop is already holding Auckland back. An inter-council working group has just reported back that it supports an Auckland to Hamilton commuter rail service (which makes sense) however won’t advise using Britomart because it is at capacity (because there’s no loop to make it a ‘through station’ which would double capacity) so will use Auckland’s old Strand station instead – less than ideal.

The Loop is necessary, transformative and affordable if the Government just re-directed some of its wasted money poured away on motorways with declining traffic, and invested it in the CBD Rail Loop to encourage rail patronage in Auckland which is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Today’s walking train was people-powered and now we need the Government to ‘get aboard’ and listen to the people of Auckland.

Today we learn that the new Council is being obliged to pay close to $2 million per month in consultant’s fees just to keep abreast (at best) of its core functions around planning and consenting, even at a time when demand is relatively low.  I have no doubt that some of the professional advice they are being charged consultancy rates for is being provided by former Council employees!

It was intensely annoying at the end of last year to hear Local Government Minister Hide making self-congratulatory noises about the amalgamation of our former councils into one ‘supercity’, as though the deal was done and dusted and everything working smoothly.

The reality of course is that the elected members and staff of the Council are still grappling with serious and fundamental challenges  just to make the new structure work and to deliver services to residents and ratepayers, problems that are an inevitable consequence of a too hasty and badly mis-managed process.

In his haste, Mr Hide and his supporters broke the first rule of any restructuring, which is ‘to take the people with you’.  He chose to use the stick rather than the carrot, the Council is now left to pick up the pieces, and the cost of that will land directly on the people who were largely ignored in the process.

In fact, their latest Government Policy Statement on transport funding shows that over the next 10 years they’re planning to spend $7 on roads for every $1 they spend on sustainable transport options such as bus, rail, walking and cycling.

And a shockingly high proportion of that ($11 to $15 billion) will go into building new and even crazier Roads of National Significance.

Meanwhile, it’s just been announced that yet another Auckland public transport project (the Manukau Spur) has been delayed and won’t open till next year. Auckland trains and buses are packed to bursting. And another survey (PDF) has just come out which confirms that Aucklanders think their public transport sucks.

Well, ok, that might be over-stating it but the latest Quality of Life survey does show that Aucklanders have a significantly lower opinion of the quality of their public transport system than residents of any other major city in NZ.

What’s the government’s solution? To spend $2 billion on a highway from Puhoi to Wellsford that most Aucklanders only use 5 times a year.

Aucklanders are fed up with a government that won’t listen to them and so am I. I’m organizing a flash mob this weekend to promote the need for the government to stop pouring billions into crazy motorways and instead fund urgently needed public transport projects like the CBD rail loop.

I hope you can join me – it’s our last chance to promote the need for more funding for public transport before the budget.

Walking Train to Promote CBD rail loop

• When: 11 am, Saturday the 14th of May
• Where: meet at corner of K Road and Pitt Street, then follow the route of the loop down Queen Street to Aotea Square and then Britomart

The spatial plan is extremely important because it will guide Auckland’s development for the next 30 years.

The Council’s discussion document isn’t perfect – in some areas it’s pretty vague and in others it doesn’t go as far towards truly sustainable solutions as we would like to see.

However, it does emphasise improving public transport, better urban design, maintaining a reasonably compact urban form, and reducing inequality. These are all good priorities for the Council to have.

While not perfect, the Council’s vision for Auckland is certainly many times better than the Government’s.

This vision, judging by the cabinet papers they have released and the transport funding decisions they are making, is for a 1950s Auckland.

Rodney Hide and Steven Joyce want more motorways for Auckland and more sprawling, low density development along our coastline. That is why they are investing so heavily in motorways outside the current urban area of Auckland, such as Puhoi to Wellsford, and putting pressure on the Council to allow development outside the Metropolitan Urban Limit.

Because the Government’s vision for Auckland is so flawed, it’s doubly important that Aucklanders make submissions to the Council putting forward their own vision for how the city can grow sustainably.

Our submission guide is not intended to be comprehensive, but hopefully it will suggest some directions for you to take in your own submissions.

As motorway, after motorway, finishes 6 months early, the slow progress of this project seems further proof that this government doesn’t really care about public transport. Looking at the timeline below you can see how much this project has been delayed by the National government. The timelime below also tells an interesting story about this government’s lack of transparency in spending public money.

• In Oct, 2008 the Labour government approved Auckland Regional Council’s plan to levy a regional fuel tax to fund the electrification of Auckland’s rail network. The Auckland Regional Transport Agency (ARTA) working with Kiwirail began preparing to ask companies to tender for the contract to build the EMUs
• In Mar, 2009 the National government announced it would cancel the regional fuel tax, preventing any agency from further developing a tender for the electric rail cars
• In Nov, 2009, 8 months later, the government approved funding of up to $500 million to purchase new EMUs and asked Kiwirail to manage the procurement process in consultation with ARTA
• On the 17th of July, 2010 according to the Auckland Transport Blog, Kiwirail announced a shortlist of 4 companies that could potentially supply the EMUs: these were Hitachi Limited; Hyundai Rotem; Bombardier Transportation Australia Pty Limited; and a consortium of Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles, SA. (CAF) and Mitsubishi Corporation. None of these companies are Chinese. Oddly enough the press release Kiwirail put out at the time is no longer up on their website but you can see a copy on the Auckland Transport Blog.
• On the 11th of July the Auckland Trains Blog reported that engineers from China were visiting NZ, drumming up work
• In July, 2010 according to the Auckland Trains Blog both Steven Joyce and John Key visited China
• On the 3rd of Sep, 2010 with almost no explanation as to why Kiwirail announced that it was inviting 10 companies to bid for the tender to build the EMUs, 6 more than the 4 who were originally shortlisted. Several of these were Chinese companies
• On the 3rd of December, 2010 it was reported that 4 companies, including Bombardier Transportation Australia which was one of the 4 companies originally shortlisted in July, 2010, had withdrawn from the tender process. The managing director of Bombardier said “Your [decision to extend the shortlist] raises questions on the level of confidence that Bombardier can have in the tender process”
• Subsequent responses to questions by the Minister of Transport have done little to clarify who is still in the running for the tender and whether all 4 of the original companies short-listed withdrew.
• Last week, the Herald reports that Sammy Wong is being investigated by the Auditor General for something related to his involvement with a Chinese rail company called Loric. And reccently Labour called on the government to defer announcing who has been awarded the contract until these investigations are finished.

Part of the delays in this project have been due to the government’s luke warm attitude to funding public transport projects. But they have also been caused by Kiwirail’s (mysterious) decision to re-open the tender in July, 2010.

Meanwhile, Auckland’s trains are at capacity and suffer from frequent breakdowns. Given the Minister’s enthusiasm for getting motorways finished quickly, it would be nice if he could also hurry this crucial public transport project along.

I don’t agree with Trevor Mallard that Kiwirail should delay announcing the winner of the contract until the end of this year. This project has been delayed long enough!

But given the size of this contract ($500 million) and the huge significance of the project, I think the Minister of Transport should offer a transparent and comprehensive explanation of why Kiwirail re-opened the tender process. Don’t you?

The Group was initiated by hapu of Te Uri o Hau and Ngati Whatua o Kaipara o Nga Rima, both of whom have kaitiaki status on areas of the harbour and its catchment.  They very quickly worked out that lots of people and organisations were doing work on and in the harbour, but there was a lack of integration or even coordination so the outcomes of the efforts were less than they could have been.

A research project delivered a solid base for understanding the condition of the harbour and of the influences acting on it, and now a combination of Western science and matauranga Maori is being applied.  An ecosystem managment approach is  generating solutions – focused actions, especially protecting the waterways feeding into the harbour from sedimant and pollutants.

One of the best presentations I thought was from two young farmers whose families have long association with the area, who are now devoting considerable resource and effort to stabilising eroding land, fencing off and protecting waterways, pest management, and retiring land that assists the ecological restoration and also has a positive effect on the productivity of land still in production.

It is early days, and a lot of work yet to be done, but as an example of Maori and non-Maori organisations and individuals working together with a common cause, to improve environmental, social and economic prospects, it is hard to beat!

I can understand what they’re thinking. After all, the CBD rail loop is an expensive project and the reconstruction of Christchurch will also cost billions. That’s one of the reasons why Russel has been advocating using a levy to pay for Christchurch. We think that is the fairest way to spread around the cost of paying for Christchurch without cutting investment in essential state services and desperately needed new public transport projects.

It’s also important to remember that, even if the government did approve funding for the CBD rail loop in the 2011 budget,  construction likely wouldn’t start until at least 2013 or 14.

After all, before the loop is built Auckland Transport will have to do a lot more planning and then apply for resource consent. That’s a slow process with any big project.

Then, once the loop does start construction it will take 5-7 years to construct. What all this means is the expenditure on the loop will be spread out over a period of many years. And the most expensive phase (the construction) probably won’t start until after a lot of the most urgent infrastructure repair work in Christchurch has been done.

But finally, we shouldn’t let ourselves get sucked in by the government’s spin. They do have the money to build the loop. They just don’t want to spend it on better rail – instead they want to spend it on uneconomic motorways.

As Steven Joyce loves to say, the government is spending $10.7 billion on motorways over the next 10 years. A lot of those are being built now or (like Waterview) will be built over the next 2-3 years – at the same time as the Christchurch rebuild peaks.

Many of these motorways (Puhoi to Wellsford, Wellington motorways) have a benefit cost ratio of less than 1. That means for every $1 we spend on them we won’t even get $1 of economic benefits back. The loop, in contrast, has a benefit cost ratio of $3.50.

In the context of rising oil prices, dropping vehicle numbers on our state highways, and sky rocketing public transport patronage I think our need for the loop is more urgent than ever.

Green Party volunteers will be getting out and about around Auckland at different railways stations over the next 3 weeks getting signatures on our CBD rail loop petition. If you’d like to join them check out the times and locations below.

Auckland City’s discussion document makes the case for a compact city, well served and made more liveable (and economically successful)  by an integrated, efficient public transport system.

The National government’s cabinet papers by comparison support a ‘more of the same’ approach, more expansion of the city’s footprint, and investment that perpetuates Auckland as a car-centric city.

The Government’s justification for this is not persuasive, even if you assume no changes in external conditions.

Their analysis becomes even less convincing when you notice the elephant in the room that the government studiously ignores; that is the inevitability of continuing rises in the price of  liquid fuel as peak oil effects kick in.

The time when peak oil could be dismissed as a mad conspiracy theory is long past, unless one thinks that the International Energy Agency is complicit in the deception.

The Agency’s official line is that peak oil will occur in 2030, but this is seen as highly optimistic even by Dr Fatih Birol, the agency’s own chief economist.  Birol thinks that 2020 or sooner is more likely, and has stated the problem very clearly, saying :

“One day we will run out of oil, it is not today or tomorrow, but one day we will run out of oil and we have to leave oil before oil leaves us’.

Incidentally, that other hotbed of radical environmentalism, the US Joint Forces Command, expects a 2012 peak.

What all this means of course is that we are most unlikely to see the price of a litre of fuel drop below the new baseline of $2-00, and it is more likely to stay well above that.  This means that filling the tank on even a modest family car will stay around the $100 mark, a big chunk out of any household’s weekly budget.

The Automobile Association has entered the fray suggesting that putting more costs on motorists in order to fund public transport initiatives means that only the rich will be able to afford to drive.

The reality is that affordability is already an issue. Spending on infrastructure that further embeds dependence on private vehicles rather than reducing it, in the face of increasing prices, is just foolish, and will guarantee that we fail to achieve environmental, social or economic sustainability for our city.