Brian Rudman: Adventures in the Third World

Venturing forth from the my cracked-walled motel unit to find some food while covering the 1987 Edgecumbe earthquake, I still remember the gridlock I got caught up in that night in downtown Whakatane.

Nothing to do with the natural disaster though. I was just the only person in town not aware it was opening night for Kentucky Fried's newest outlet - and Whakatane's first encounter with international fast food.

By the next day, curiosity had been satisfied and calm restored, and so, I suspect, will normality soon return to Auckland and the Sylvia Park mega mall.

Indeed it's quite endearing to discover that just beneath the laid back cosmopolitan veneer of tens of thousands of Aucklanders still lurks the spirit of the bargain-hunting, curiosity-driven, yokel. Thankfully I had to go to work otherwise I too might have succumbed to the temptation of a $49 television and ended up stalled on the Newmarket Viaduct.

Of course every attention-seeking opportunist was quick to leap in with their spin on yesterday's chaos. First with a press release was the shameless Maurice Williamson, National Party transport spokesman, who burbled on about the mall-opening gridlock having "highly exposed" the "inadequacies of Auckland's Third World roading network".

I'd have thought that as National government transport minister from November 1993 to November 1999 (except for a year's gap in 1997) he'd have kept his head down on the state of our highways. After all, if anyone's to blame for the shortcomings of Auckland's motorway system, it's him and his National Party cronies who starved Auckland of a rightful proportion of roading funds in the 1990s in order to criss-cross sparsely-peopled, National-voting rural electorates with superfluous strips of tarmac.

Transit figures reveal that in the 1990s, only 25 per cent of Transit money was spent north of Pukekohe, despite just under 40 per cent of the population living here. In other words our motorway system was short-changed by around $50 million a year, the cash siphoned off to remote boy-racer highways in blue-rinse backwaters like Clutha, Taranaki and Rakaia. If Auckland's highway network is Third World now, then that's the reason.

What's really scary is that Mr Williamson actually seems to believe that we should have a motorway system that can cope with the one-off lemming-like traffic jams generated by once-in-100-years openings like this. Look out volcanoes. Look out green spaces. Look out Hobson Bay. If he takes office, you're all flattened.

Yesterday's excitement did underline a couple of truths though. The first is in relation to Transit New Zealand's much criticised opposition to commercial developments springing up alongside new state highways and bypasses accompanied by the automatic expectation of the developers that access will be provided as though it was just another local road.

Just two months ago, Mr Williamson, National leader Don Brash and local MP Lockwood Smith made a special visit to Warkworth to declare a National government would strip Transit of its power to oppose such developments.

Yesterday was a perfect example of what Transit was trying to avoid. Yet does Mr Williamson understand that? It seems not.

His solution seems to be to bring in private developers to build more roads. Alongside which, one presumes, will come more shopping centres to slow the traffic down yet again, thus creating a demand for yet more roads.

The other truth revealed was how much easier it would have been if the promised rail station had been open. I appreciate it might have been a bit awkward trying to lug some of the larger whiteware bargains home by train, but how much easier for the curious and the browsers if public transport links had been operative.

They could have waved mockingly at car-trapped shoppers stranded kilometres short of their target.

But the rail link could be a year away. It seems no one involved - the developers or the Auckland Regional Transport Authority or On Track or the Auckland City Council - saw the promotional possibilities associated with linking the 21st century shopping experience with the 21st century way to travel.

But why should I be surprised about that.