Sandra Paterson: No fuss here to take a bus

Not a week goes by without me thinking how much I like where I live. I never fail to appreciate Mt Maunganui's natural beauty or the relative ease of small-town living - with the gym, my parents' house and the beach all within five minutes' walk and where no friend lives further than a 20-minute drive away.

At least, that was how long it used to take. These days, with roughly 100 people a week moving to the region and another 54 cars on the road seven days a week, driving around Tauranga can be a nightmare.

And visitors from Auckland are always surprised to discover that they are not the only ones living with major traffic problems.

The drive across the harbour bridge to my daughter's school, for example, should take 12 minutes. But these days it is more like half an hour and sometimes up to an hour.

When I read how 32 new homes are being built in the Tauranga region every week, moving further down the coast to Opotiki starts to look like a good idea. But I'm a "Mountie" at heart and ideally would stay here a long time. I just wish local politicians and planners would think a little more laterally when it comes to solving traffic problems, be it in Tauranga or Auckland or anywhere else where population is exploding.

I am no town planning expert, but it seems to me the answer lies not in more motorways, more bridges, more tunnels or anything else that panders to our love of the motor car. The car is the problem. Neither can anyone afford to wait another generation for some sort of colossally expensive rail system, which would solve transport woes for only a fraction of frustrated residents.

The answer for fast-growing cities where cost is a major consideration is the humble bus.

But not a free bus service, as the Residents Action Network in Auckland is calling for, although the petition they are circulating is on the right track.

What we need is a win-win public transport system - one that pays for itself, with no ongoing operating costs to the taxpayer, but which remains cheap as chips for the punters.

In short, we need to look at a city in Brazil called Curitiba.

Curitiba is a city of 1.8 million people, with another million in its wider metropolitan area. But no one lives further than 500m from a bus-stop and no one waits more than five minutes for a bus.

Car ownership rates are similar to Auckland's, yet the bus system is so efficient an astounding 75 per cent of people use it to get to work.

The mastermind behind the famous system is architect and former mayor Jamie Lerner, who ended his final term in office with an unprecedented 97 per cent approval rating. Lerner devised a simple plan to run dedicated bus lanes down the centre of five existing arterial routes into the city centre, fed by a vast spider-web of smaller routes.

The main arterial roads function as transport corridors, where commercial and residential growth is encouraged and where articulated buses run every 30 seconds.

At every bus-stop across the city, you pay for your fare at specially designed tube-shaped kiosks, enter the tube then wait for the bus. Not for long, usually, because the bus companies are fined $200 for every minute drivers are late.

The kiosks are built at the same level as the buses and both sets of doors open at the same time. There are no stairs to climb, no time spent waiting to buy tickets and every journey costs the same: $1.35.

So in Auckland terms it would cost the same to travel from downtown to Newmarket as it would from Mt Wellington to Titirangi, with the shorter trips "subsidising" the long ones - a boon for low-income families in outlying suburbs.

In Curitiba, 12 private companies own and run the buses while an urban authority assigns the routes and collects the fares, paying the bus companies for each kilometre not for each passenger.

As efficient as an underground railway, it is 200 times cheaper, pays for itself and can be set up in six months.

So what are we waiting for? None of this is new and most town planners and politicians have heard of Curitiba. Morgan Williams, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, led a team there two years ago and Jaime Lerner himself visited Auckland last year to advise city officials.

"Oh, but Auckland is different and you don't understand the Resource Management Act and it's not that simple," many of them whined. But Lerner, now the president of the International Union of Architects, hears the same thing in cities all over the world and has the same answers.

Any city, he says, can vastly improve its transport system and its quality of life in two years. Get people out of their cars by providing cheaper, more efficient alternatives.

A city needs to decide what it wants - be it in transport, recycling, air quality or whatever - and create a long-term master plan, which, although flexible, is not subject to the whims of changing politicians. "But what's important is to start," he told us. "You cannot waste any more time."

That was a year ago. In the words of the philosopher Nike, we should "just do it".

* Sandra Paterson, of Mt Maunganui, is a freelance journalist.