But of course, it is buses, because Hawke's Bay (population 180,000 across two cities and numerous towns) doesn't have a single train, tram, underground or any other funky form of public transport.
The council's draft plan, all 53 pages of it, should have been a call to action for the region. Within prosaic sentences are statements and statistics to knock you for six.
It notes that 10 per cent of people walk or cycle to work, but also makes the blistering (albeit uncited) declaration that Hawke's Bay has the lowest physical activity rate in New Zealand.
It notes the region has one of the highest obesity rates in the country, with over 70 per cent of adults and over 35 per cent of children aged 2-14 considered overweight or obese.
It blames "car dependency". Too right.
Hawke's Bay has the worst rate of physical activity in NZ, the plan claims. Photo / NZME
Among the trail of woe is a statistic showing the use of buses actually declined from 799,000 "boardings" in 2013-14 to 645,000 in 2018-19.
And then it reveals there has been a 42 per cent explosion in the number of cars on Hawke's Bay roads since 2001.
If an increased population is taken into account, it's still a 29 per cent per-capita rise.
The harbinger of climate change doom, An Inconvenient Truth, came out in 2006. Hawke's Bay shrugged and chose convenience.
You have to wonder if the plan's goal over the next 10 years - to turn 10.5 per cent of walkers, cyclists and bus takers into 30 per cent - is possible.
To turn around this car-focused steering wheel, the council will have to be crystal clear that the only solution is to be radical.
Its "Uber bus", touted as a public transport solution, will barely make a dent.
An alternative roadmap starts with roads. There's five or six of them that wind their way between the twin cities. Make two for buses only. Make another for cyclists only.
Make all public transport free.
Invest in more buses and better buses – get one outside as many houses as possible every 10 minutes in the morning.
Connect the buses to comfortable transfer stations where express services between the Twin Cities leaves every minute or two. Build the capacity, build the demand.
Forget about a shiny new hotel and turn the abandoned council offices in Napier into a huge central bus exchange.
In Hastings, knock down the green Westpac building eyesore and co-opt the carpark for a proper central bus exchange.
In Havelock North, use the old recycling bins land as a park-and-ride facility, where people can either hire bikes or hop onto direct buses into Hastings or Napier.
Bring back commuter rail, and give Central Hawke's Bay a public transport option as you do it.
It might need some hard negotiation with KiwiRail - suggest to them we'll ban all freight trains from travelling through Hastings and Napier between 6am and 8pm unless there's two or three passenger carriages attached to the back of them.
These are just ideas, sure. But we need ideas.
Or we sit idly in traffic on the Hawke's Bay Expressway, turning up the air-conditioning as the world heats up around us.
