Horse and cart - and jetpack optional

Transport planners struggling to chart an uncertain future are being urged to look back more than 500 years to Leonardo da Vinci's vision of a one-person flying machine.

The 15th century Italian inventor has been hailed by a professional "futurist" at a conference in Auckland for recognising a timeless human desire for freedom of movement.

"What do I want in terms of my personal mobility?" was Wellington consultant and former oil industry executive Robin Gunstan's rhetorical question to 200 delegates to the Local Government Traffic Institute [Trafinz].

"I want freedom of where I can go at any point at any time and want control of all modes."

Mr Gunstan, a commercial manager for the Marsden Pt oil refinery before becoming a fulltime "futurist strategist", advised planners to break free of incremental thinking wedded to the more recent past.

He said much of New Zealand's roading infrastructure harked back to horse and cart tracks built 100 years ago, and was totally unsuitable for modern society.

Showing a slide of a motorway jammed with 10 lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic, he said too much planning involved "more of the same with just some slight variation - maybe a few more intelligent traffic signs".

"It doesn't actually conceive that life would ever be different. It maybe takes advantage of some new technologies, but when we build it, it's for incredibly long time periods - it's still around when we're six foot under the ground."

But as a former oil importer, he was acutely aware of depleting fuel supplies, and expected New Zealand would have no more bitumen in 20 years for maintaining roads.

"So what are we going to build our roads out of - what sort of planning are we doing to maintain and build our roading for the future?" he said.

He wondered on the other hand about the level of demand for roads if da Vinci's dream bore out, and the jetpack hovering system of Christchurch inventor Glenn Martin became a popular mode of personal transport.

"What will the role of the New Zealand Transport Agency be if people adopt this in a big way - is this to do with them or the CAA [Civil Aviation Authority], God help us?"

Mr Gunstan said installing light-rail tracks down the centre of roads appeared to be one way of coping with dwindling fuel supplies, and even suggested a possible return to horses and carts alongside personal flying machines.

He believed one of the biggest challenges facing New Zealand would be an ascendancy of the Chinese yuan to the rank of the world's premium reserve currency, "certainly over the next 20 years".

China was lobbying the International Monetary Fund vigorously to displace the United States dollar and control how the world traded.

"So we may not be able to buy any oil in 2030 ... because our currency against the yuan may be totally and utterly worthless," he said.

New Zealand Institute director Rick Bovin said that although many people seemed to expect major fuel cost rises after a peak in world oil production, the longer-term prognosis was not so clear, against the possibility of harnessing wind and solar energy for transport.

But Dr Bovin said transport planners needed to prepare for dramatic sea-level rises likely to threaten coastal roads and installations such as airports ... and a serious challenge would be to maintain investment in infrastructure.