Dialogue: Profitable ideas to get city's peak traffic up to speed

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Ifto come to grief on the road, I have a good idea where it will happen. Most Auckland commuters, whatever their route, could probably say the same.

We are all amateur road engineers, having plenty of time to study the subject in low gear. We could all nominate an accident waiting to happen. Given the chance soon, some of us might invest in fixing it.

If the Government is serious about inviting private investment in roads, my first nomination is the southbound motorway through St Marys Bay, where the lanes coming off the harbour bridge divide, two to Fanshawe St, two to the Victoria Park flyover.

The flyover needs to be wider, as motorway planners have been saying for at least 20 years. It would be the easiest and most effective of improvements, you would think, but those are the ones that never seem to get done.

So traffic heading to the Victoria Park bottleneck invariably is backed up through St Marys Bay and that always seems to be a surprise to a few. As they slow and even stop, hoping to be let in, they cause havoc in the lanes leading to Fanshawe St.

Another glaring oddity, to my inexpert mind, is the lack of a link from the Southern Motorway to the airport motorway. It defies reason that people driving from the city centre to the airport are directed through the streets of Epsom.

How obvious could it be to put a connection through a few kilometres of industrial land from Penrose to the new Mangere Bridge? Yet when I have put that suggestion to regional transport planners several times I've met blank incomprehension.

Is that sort of thing too simple for them? Would it undermine some other grand design they have in mind? They don't say.

To sit in Auckland's congestion is to wonder at the ways of public agencies. It must have occurred to the most ardent socialist that something sick has happened here.

It might be that the city has been captive to the notion - seriously advanced sometimes - that catering to rising demand means covering the place in asphalt. Or it might just be that roading is one of the few necessities of life still provisioned by central command.

Possibly not for much longer. The Government's decisions last week went a bit further than a knee-jerk national petrol tax for Auckland's benefit. It also contemplates private funding of new roads, or "public/private partnerships" as these fairly ardent socialists prefer to call it.

That ought to mean that a company can build a road - or bridge, or tunnel - and charge tolls for a period in which it believes it can recover a reasonable profit. Thereafter, the road would revert to public ownership.

All of which can happen now but it takes special legislation. Henceforth, ministerial consent will be sufficient - along with all the environmental approvals that dog these things.

It is not clear from the Government's usual fudge whether private initiative is envisaged or investors will be invited merely to lend money to projects conceived by local bodies or Transit NZ. But we can hope for the best.

As it happens, there was a private initiative some years ago that could have relieved congestion in St Marys Bay. McConnell Dowell proposed to lay a tunnel on the floor of the Waitemata to take citybound traffic away from the harbour bridge.

Unfortunately, the economics of the tunnel depended on the restoration of tolls on the bridge. No Government would dare. But there might be another way of making it pay.

The bridge could remain toll-free but lose its three inner-city ramps. The tunnel would then be the only direct route between the North Shore and the central business district. To avoid the toll people would need to drive through Ponsonby or double back from Gillies Ave.

Few would bother, unless the toll was crippling. That is the benefit of private investment. It needs to assess whether the public values something enough to make it worth the cost.

Toll roads, the Government says, will be approved only where a free alternative exists for those who cannot afford to pay. That is fair, so long as the test is not equal convenience. Once I have opened my airport connection, would the route through Epsom be considered a reasonable alternative? I doubt it.

Transport Minister Mark Gosche has no doubt heard some interesting tales from his department about those who cannot afford to pay. In the United States, apparently, those who choose to use toll roads are not confined to the rich or expense-account riders.

Often they are tradesmen travelling to a job, or career women delivering children to daycare - anyone, in fact, whose time is precious.

The freeways, they say, are more likely to be used by the likes of those who can do business by telephone.

Tolls are never welcome but when you are reduced to a crawl they don't seem so bad. They permit the kind of investment that promises to do more for a city's arteries than the petrol tax, public transport schemes, a "national cycling strategy" or any of the other dross in the decisions last week.

Political life has come to its senses about roading at long last. The Auckland local elections last year turned the tide. Some of those commuters caught in the congestion are indeed engineers, and in future they may not fume in frustration. If they have the chance to float profitable ideas, all of us could be travelling well.