Alasdair Thompson: Just one way to solve our traffic woes

COMMENT

Auckland has an urgent need for a single transport authority responsible for integrating and running the region's roads, buses, ferries and rail network. The concept has the firm support of business and road-user associations, such as the Automobile Association, and freight companies. It would also clear away numerous impediments to developing better modes of passenger transport.

The Government will soon announce more details on how such a new superbody to tackle transport will operate and be funded. So what might the organisation look like?

Auckland Transport will need the authority to access, invest and demonstrate accountability for funds drawn from a wide variety of sources. Its revenue streams would come from the region's ratepayers, Infrastructure Auckland, the Government through Transfund, and special grants and income from tolls and the like.

Its powers will need to be robust or it could succumb to the region's traditional intercity wrangling.

No Aucklander thinks that today's transport management systems are halfway efficient or remotely satisfactory. An organisation with a single transport focus would cut through convoluted and poorly linked transport governance structures.

The Auckland Regional Council is responsible for transport strategy and planning, and is gathering large sums of ratepayer money for investing in Auckland's passenger transport systems. But it is not empowered to run those systems.

Importantly, in tackling its mission the regional council must persuade a large number of other players to join in the region's strategy. In other words, to be accountable for the wise spending of ratepayers' transport funds, the regional council must get the region's seven mayors and Infrastructure Auckland to agree, while managing constructive relationships with Transfund, Transit, the Ministry of Transport, the Land Transport Safety Authority and Auckland Rail Transport Network Ltd.

With only the powers of persuasion in the backpack, the task has often proved a summit too far.

For example, Auckland Rail Transport has sought to develop a rail network while resolving the competing interests of the region's four cities, three district councils, Tranz Rail, Trackco (with the Treasury and the Prime Minister's Department heavily involved), not to mention public expectations.

The larger question is whether a new separate authority should be set up or the existing one, the Auckland Regional Council, be reformed and commissioned with the task.

New authorities and their bureaucracies always add new costs and take time to get up to speed. In calling for a new organisation, stakeholders have usually lost confidence in the one they have. This is the risk the regional council faces in the context of Auckland's transport woes.

But the confused transport governance structure which the regional council has had to work under is the main culprit for the failure to install an integrated transport system, not the regional council.

On the contrary, the regional council is a highly competent organisation with a skilled and responsible staff. The evidence for this is its Baldrige business excellence quality award. Woolly thinking in public by some of council's elected representatives obscures this achievement; only three other New Zealand organisations have attained the criteria required to reach it.

If people disagree with the regional council, it is nevertheless pointless to create another organisation with which they may also disagree. Surely it is better to manage constructively the points of disagreement.

Auckland's single transport authority should be placed under the aegis of the Auckland Regional Council, with Infrastructure Auckland folded into a regional council-managed regional infrastructure fund.

An independent assessment of the value that Infrastructure Auckland adds would probably conclude it would be greater if that were the case.

No doubt a reshaping of the regional council's powers and responsibilities is required to set up Auckland Transport within its administration. If it were, a far simpler and more clearly accountable set of obligations could be established.

With the regional council responsible for setting the region's transport strategy and administering a single transport authority at arm's length from its strategic role, Auckland would be far more strongly placed to ensure the Government delivered to the region a full share of the tax and other funds it gathers from it.

Representation on Auckland Transport by the likes of Transfund, Transit and Infrastructure Auckland would also be facilitated if such an administrative authority were vested in it at arm's length from the regional council.

Whether the finer details of this structure are adopted, there is an urgent need for a single governance structure to integrate the region's roads, buses, rail and ferry public transport networks.

* Alasdair Thompson is the chief executive of the Employers and Manufacturers Association (Northern).