Editorial: NZ’s new motorways ease travel, but funding challenges loom

It is only a year or two since the Waikato Expressway was completed with its Hamilton bypass. Photo / NZ Transport Agency

Editorial

• Recent road improvements include extensions to Warkworth and Cambridge, enhancing travel north and south.
• Transport Minister Simeon Brown suggests tolls for future ‘roads of national significance’ due to funding gaps.
• Public opposition exists, but tolls could encourage thoughtful road use and fund infrastructure.

Driving north or south from Auckland these holidays, you find you are cruising on smooth, wide, well-engineered roads in each direction, safely separated and designed for speeds of 110km/h.

They are a joy to drive on for as far as they go, which is now Warkworth in the north and just beyond Cambridge to the south. To reach the end is to wish they went further.

We are impatient, we tend to forget it is only a year or two since the Waikato Expressway was completed with its Hamilton bypass, and the Northern Gateway was extended beyond Pūhoi. Those who tell us New Zealand has an infrastructure deficit ignore the motorways added in recent years.

Auckland has the Waterview tunnel and northwestern connections, Wellington has its Transmission Gully and new motorway on the Kāpiti Coast. Christchurch now has highways around its western perimeter.

One or two of those projects seemed to take an inordinately long time, but for the most part they were carefully prioritised and programmed by NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) with the revenue it receives from petrol tax, vehicle licence fees and road user charges.

Petrol, however, is ceasing to be a reliable source of roading finance as more of us switch to electric vehicles. While we enjoy their lower running cost, we need to face the fact the roads we are on need to be financed somehow.

If you have been grateful these holidays to avoid the previous bottleneck at Warkworth and you are looking forward to the motorway’s extension to Wellsford and eventually through the Brynderwyns, be warned.

Transport Minister Simeon Brown is talking rather bravely about tolls for the Government’s next batch of “roads of national significance”. NZTA’s projected revenue will not cover their cost.

Brown recently told Parliament’s transport committee the agency has been collecting public views on user-pays possibilities. He did not reveal the results, but the public verdict is unlikely to be favourable.

The Government has just backed off a plan to toll the new Manawatū-to-Tararua highway in the face of intense local opposition.

Life seems a little less free when you cannot simply drive everywhere without risk of having to pay. That is probably why polls find people would prefer roads to be financed from tax. Taxes create an illusion that things are free.

They also seem fairer than a toll some people might not be able to afford. But nor can they probably afford an EV. It would be more unfair to let EVs continue to free-ride on petrol taxpayers.

Tolls are not the only conceivable alternative. EVs perhaps could be taxed annually for their assumed road use. But tolls, or a metered charge such as what trucks pay, do not only raise revenue.

They have the added benefit of making drivers think whether they need to use this road, or any road, for this journey at this time.

New roads of high quality make it easier to accept that increasingly, we are going to have to pay as we drive.