Chris Bishop makes a point while Christopher Luxon looks on. Photo / Getty Images
Chris Bishop makes a point while Christopher Luxon looks on. Photo / Getty Images
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Transport, Housing and Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop made a big speech about Auckland last week.
He set out a vision for a denser city, with development focused on rapid-transit lines.
He argued that this was the key to increased productivity and growth.
“I believe,” said the minister, “that in order to properly unlock economic growth in Auckland, we must embrace the concept of transit-oriented development adopted by the world’s best and most liveable cities.
“This approach promotes compact, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly cities, with development clustered around, and integratedwith, mass transit. The idea is to have as many jobs, houses, services and amenities as possible around public transport stations.”
The minister was Chris Bishop, whose portfolios include infrastructure, housing and now transport. He was speaking last week to about 100 people, mainly from the business community, brought together by an outfit called the Committee for Auckland.
“This is not an untested theory,” said Bishop. “Transit-oriented development has been adopted across the world in cities like Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Singapore.”
Ooh I just love it when a minister talks like that. Let’s be like Stockholm and Copenhagen. Perhaps if I ever need another job he’ll take me on as a speechwriter.
“Cities that embrace this approach consistently outperform those that don’t across multiple metrics: they experience increases in productivity, lower unemployment, higher population growth, increased availability of homes, and more stable rents.”
You said it, minister. It’s all true. And that wasn’t all.
Bishop revealed that legislation for congestion charging — tolls on specified roads at their busiest times — will be introduced to Parliament next month. And funding has been approved to remove some level crossings. It’ll take a while, but it has to happen. Intriguingly, the money comes from a contingency fund previously earmarked, in part, for roads of national significance.
And he’s keen to rethink one of Auckland’s most contentious planning issues: the status of view shafts, which protect sightlines to the volcanic cones. (More on this soon.)
“I suspect some of you are sitting there wondering what a boy from the Hutt would know about Auckland, our largest city,” he said.
If you ask me, that boy from the Hutt knows a good deal more about Auckland than several of the MPs who live in it.
“Let me reassure you,” he went on, “I know and love this city. I lived here for two years, many of my friends live here, and I am here almost every week.”
Back to Stockholm and Copenhagen.
“Our challenge as a country,” said Bishop, “isn’t just about the last few years, or even the last decade. We have low productivity growth, low capital intensity in our firms, low levels of competition in many sectors, challenges in attracting and retaining skills and talent, low uptake of innovation, unaffordable housing and a growing tail of New Zealanders leaving school without basic skills.”
But in a well-functioning city, he said, “A floor filled with smart people working next to each other, in a building filled with floors of smart people working next to each other, unsurprisingly, enables greater economic opportunities for productive growth. Proximity encourages collaboration and innovation.
“Transit-oriented development creates exactly these kinds of possible agglomeration effects — for example, it has been shown that doubling job density increases productivity by 5%-10%. The evidence speaks for itself.”
He was, he said, proud to call himself an urbanist.
Was it the best speech a Cabinet Minister has ever made about Auckland? Best since Sir Dove-Myer ‘Robbie’ Robinson, perhaps. Certainly it was the first I can remember where a minister got right to the heart of the conundrum of this city: Why doesn’t it perform better?
A question more commonly expressed as: Why is everyone stuck in traffic?
Also, not unrelated: Why aren’t we fizzing with innovation? Why does residential property cost so much? Why are young people giving up and going to Australia?
Sir Dove-Myer Robinson, known as Robbie, mayor of Auckland in the 1970s, leads a bike ride along Tāmaki Drive during the opening of the shared path.
Bishop’s answer, and in my view it’s the right answer, is that we’ve spent decades refusing to believe that, in an urban setting, increased productivity relies on big, dense cities whose efficiency derives from quality public transport.
Stockholm, which has grown on that model, was his specific example: “Gross value added per capita grew 41% between 1993 and 2010. In fact, both Stockholm and Copenhagen rank as among the world’s top cities in terms of per capita GDP.”
And in Sydney, the new Metro (which you might like to think of as underground light rail) has attracted so much high-density housing and mixed-use developments around its stations, it’s “expected to contribute around AUD$5 billion annually to the New South Wales economy”.
Meanwhile, Bishop said, roads in the Auckland metro area in 2024 “had the highest congestion levels in Oceania”.
If you’re surprised at that, don’t be. It’s the direct result of having so much low-rise and sprawl and the least developed transit of any large city in Australasia.
Bishop called for zoning in Auckland to abandon the six-storey limit around major transit stops, which defines the height of most apartment blocks.
“We are going to need to go much, much higher than that around the CRL stations if we truly want to feel the benefits of transit-oriented development. My aspiration is that in 10-20 years’ time, we have 10-20-storey apartment blocks dotting the rail line as far west as Swanson and Ranui.”
He specifically criticised the zoning in Kingsland, which has a train station and several bus routes, but a “special character” overlay put there by the council keeps most of the suburb as single-housing.
“How about if our aim is to make the ‘special character’ of suburbs be that they are thriving, liveable, affordable communities with access to regular and reliable public transport?”
Bring it on.
It wasn’t all wonderful. In setting out his prescription for a denser, more productive city, Bishop failed to mention some essential elements.
One was green space. You can’t just build more apartments, you also have to provide more recreational amenities and that means growing the presence of nature in the city. More trees, more parks, more rain gardens and planting along the streets.
And that requires a rethink of how we use our streets.
The other was cycleways. Stockholm and Copenhagen don’t thrive only because of the density on public-transport routes. They are both also committed to cycling and walking. The relatively small spend on cycleways in those cities has produced a massively better economic return than spending on any other transport option.
The same is true here: roads of national significance struggle in benefit/cost analysis to get a better score than 1:1. That’s a dollar of benefit for a dollar of cost. But cycleways can score far better than that.
Simon Kingham was the chief science adviser to the Ministry of Transport, until the Government decided it didn’t need pesky people like him hanging around. He reports that “money spent on high-quality cycling infrastructure yields benefits between 10 and 25 times the costs”.
In Copenhagen, it’s reported that 62% of metro commuters ride a bike. And it doesn’t drop much in winter.
Chris Bishop, centre, with former Transport Minister Simeon Brown and the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon. Photo / Mark Mitchell
I mention this because I asked Bishop about it and he seemed, well, puzzled. I said that everywhere his vision of a modern city works, there is good safe cycling. Would he be rewriting the Government Policy Statement on Transport promulgated by his predecessor as transport minister, Simeon Brown, to allow more cycleways to be built?
He said councils were free to build cycleways now.
But that isn’t true. The GPS and related policies make it very clear cycleways should not be built with Government money, and councils spending their own funds to do it could face cuts in their Government-provided transport funding.
When Prime Minister Christopher Luxon railed against councils wasting their money on “nice to haves” last year, this was the kind of spending he meant.
Cycling aside, I asked Bishop if he had the support of his Cabinet colleagues for his urbanist’s analysis of a productive city, because none of them have spoken about Auckland the way he does.
“What do you mean?” he said. “I’m the minister.”
He’s not the Minister for Auckland, though.
The man who still has that job, Simeon Brown, made the equivalent speech to the Committee for Auckland a year ago. He talked about potholes, raising speed limits and a new harbour crossing that would not include walking or cycling. Bishop didn’t go near that kind of stuff.
